** SPANKING THE MONKEY
In Spanking the Monkey, writer-director David O. Russell has pulled off no small feat–he’s made a film about incest that shifts nimbly back and forth between comedy and drama. Raymond Aibelli (Jeremy Davies) has just finished his first year at MIT and is anticipating going off on a highly desirable summer internship. But after returning home for what he thinks will be a brief visit, his father informs him that he’ll have to stay there and care for his bedridden mother (played with frowzy insouciance by Alberta Watson), who’s been laid up with a leg injury. Other domestic chores include brushing the dog’s teeth on a regular basis and using the car to run errands, though Raymond can’t have it for personal use. (In one funny scene, the father tries to calculate how many miles Raymond will have to drive the car over the course of the summer.) Meanwhile, the oozing, unctuous, adulterous father (Benjamin Hendrickson) will be traveling around the country in his job as a videotape salesman. And so things are set up for the aberrations to follow: mother and son alone together for the summer, drawn closer and closer by their frustration and alienation.
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Spanking the Monkey provokes certain obvious comparisons with other films dealing with incest: Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Luna, for instance. But it reminds me more of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate–these are both portraits of depressed young men handling the coming-of-age ordeal rather awkwardly. Not the least of their problems is coping with a massive oedipal conflict, though in The Graduate the incest is only figurative: the hero sleeps with his girlfriend’s mother. Both films share an understated dark irony partly offset by crisp, breezy camera work. And both use a fair number of close-ups to emphasize the hero’s increasing sense of claustrophobia and entrapment.
Although Russell is largely successful in his take on a difficult subject, several implausibilities hurt the story. The father seems too easygoing to insist that Raymond take care of his mother because hired help and Raymond’s loopy aunt are untrustworthy. And Raymond’s quiet acquiescence when his father demands that he stay home for the summer is not easy to buy. Raymond may be depressed and unsure of himself in some ways, but a young man this academically focused and directed would put up more of a fight.
