One week from the day this goes live, actress Elizabeth Olsen will be the female lead on a new MCU-based TV series on Disney+, showing her character Wanda Maximoff dealing with the death of her android lover. Or something. It looks a little weird, so who knows? However, as much as I enjoy the movies of the MCU, I think even the biggest fans of those movies would say there hasn’t been a whole lot for Olsen to do in her role. Now, that comes down mostly to the fact that she really hasn’t been asked to do that much.

But when she got her first starring role in the feature film Martha Marcy May Marlene, it becomes obvious that she is a talented actress, so perhaps the new series will allow her to show what she can do when she isn’t stuck in a supporting character role. Regardless, she no doubt gained enough notice to even get the MCU gig thanks to Martha Marcy May Marlene, so why not see how that goes?

The movie opens with a young woman in a small farm house where there are a lot of other people. It looks like there are some clear gender roles on hand as the men and women eat separately, and the men eat first while the women watch. It’s some kind of cult run by John Hawkes’s character Patrick. The woman, known in the cult as Marcy May (Olsen), decides to leave and after a tense chase through the woods and the one member who finds her seemingly letting her go, she gets on the phone to call her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) for a ride out of the backwoods town she’s currently hiding in. Oh, and her name is apparently really Martha.

So, is the cult after her? The movie never really says one way or the other, but what we have instead is a character study for Martha/Marcy May/Marlene (she goes by all three, and see the movie to find out where “Marlene” comes from). She never tells Lucy or Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) where exactly she’s been for the last couple years, suggesting she just had an abusive boyfriend. Instead, she just acts in very odd ways her family doesn’t understand, like stripping naked to go swimming in a public lake or just climbing into bed next to the two of them while they were having sex themselves, or even flipping out on a bartender at a party Lucy and Ted were hosting in their large lake house.

And then, in a series of flashbacks, we see how Martha joined the cult in the first place, and the gradual degradations she went through to get her to where she is. Sure, the cult seemed like a bunch of cool people writing songs about her and letting her do chores around the farm out of her gratitude, but then it goes to what looks like a rape for her first sexual experience with Patrick only for the other women to reinforce how “special” it must have been. That leads to firearms lessons, breaking-and-entering, group sex, and a whole lot of other things clearly designed to make Martha think she doesn’t really matter outside the cult.

Olsen is fantastic in this. It’s easy to see how an earnest and somewhat idealistic young woman could become what she is, and likewise, her fears that the cult could come looking for her, and why she doesn’t just tell Lucy and Ted what happened, do make sense, but her fears and worries, along with her seeming inability to function in society, are all there in her face in a strong performance that makes we want to see what she can really do as an actress, and I’m not quite sure the MCU will do that. I’ll have to look elsewhere for her work.

Grade: A


0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder