Michael Fassbender.
Born in Germany, raised in Ireland, he is the “It” boy of present day cinema.
He was one of the oiled up muscled bodies in Zack Snyder’s battle royal 300. He made his big break as Bobby Sands in the harrowing 2008 film Hunger. Since then he has played a man who gets involved with his girlfriend’s teenage daughter (Fish Tank), the victim of torture porn terror (Eden Lake), a film critic turned tragic spy (Inglourious Basterds), the brooding Mr. Rochester (Jane Eyre), an assassin for hire (Haywire) and the master of magnetism himself (X-Men: First Class). Soon we will see the ubiquitous actor play an android in Ridley Scott’s highly anticipated Prometheus.
Today, we are here to talk about two of Herr Fassbender’s films, specifically, a pair of films, originally making their theatrical debut in 2011 that are finally making it to Harrisburg this very month.
The first of these is A Dangerous Method, the latest from Canadian auteur David Cronenberg. He plays Carl Jung opposite Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Kiera Knightley as the Russian woman who brought these two classic minds together and, in turn, who tore them apart. Cronenberg, more in his A History of Violence mode than his earlier Videodrome or Scanners mode, hands us a deep and haunting take on the delicate relationship between sex and sanity. Playing out as a ménage à trois of the mind (though mind you, there is much of the body as well) Cronenberg’s film is a sharply tuned near masterpiece of psychological derangement – and we get Fassbender at its juicy center.
The other film making its way to Harrisburg this month is Shame. The film is directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that Steve McQueen), the man who gave us Fassbender’s breakthrough Hunger, and has been saddled with an NC-17 rating for the full frontal nudity of Fassbender’s sex addict main character (a full frontal of epic proportions at that) and therefore may not be for everyone.
But even so, with a bravura performance by the seemingly omnipresent actor as a man dealing with the demons of addiction, and McQueen’s delicate yet audacious directorial style, it is a not-to-miss cinematic experience indeed – and not just for the endowments that made even George Clooney blush and gush at the Golden Globes.
Due to the NC-17 rating, the film will end up reaching less people than most movies, and that is a (pardon the pun) shame because it is a stellar and harrowing look at a man and his addiction. It is highlighted by a performance that many, including yours truly dear readers, believe to have been one of the biggest snubs at this year’s Academy Awards.
Both of these films will debut at Midtown Cinema in March and both are well worth the wait we had to endure from their respective late fall releases in New York and L.A. Other films coming our way include the equally long anticipated A Separation, The Skin I Live In, Albert Nobbs and We Need to Talk About Kevin – but none of these star Michael Fassbender, so we can talk about them another time.
Trivia Question: In Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Michael Fassbender plays Archie Hickox, a British film historian and critic whose knowledge of German cinema and culture makes him the perfect candidate to go undercover as a Nazi officer. What real life film critic and award-winning novelist, who also worked as a spy during WWII (though to less tragic circumstances), is this character based upon? Find out the answer in my next column.
