SPANKING THE MONKEY
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1995 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ***
SPANKING THE MONKEY is a tragedy about a frighteningly dysfunctional family. It is not an exploitive movie, but it does manage to work in just about every taboo or controversial subject you can think of from incest to drugs to physical self-love. Why in the world would I give this movie a good rating? Have I lost my mind? Well, I rated it such because it is an excellent study of the evils of what horrifically awful parents can do to a child.
In the movie the 21-year-old boy (Jeremy Davies) is repressed, angry, and withdrawn. He is a brilliant scholar - valedictorian of his high school class and MIT premed student. He is just about to go to Washington for a prestigious internship for the summer when he gets roped by his father (Benjamin Hendrickson) into caring for his mother (Alberta Watson) who has broken her ankle, is in a cast, and has to stay in bed. His father on the other hand, is too busy as a traveling salesman to do anything other than bark obtuse and impossible to follow orders to his son. The father has a girlfriend on the side and could care less about his family. He views them mainly as getting in the way of him having a good time.
For purely marketing reasons I suppose, this movie is being billed as a biting comedy. As directed by David O. Russell, it is absolutely no such thing. It is a depressing tragedy from the start. It starts on a low note and rapidly descends into the hell of a family gone tragically wrong. The way the father treats the son is pathetic yet realistic. You can feel the pain of the boy. Davies's acting is excellent. YOU get depressed because he is so depressed.
The parental blame for what they have done to their son is shared by the mother. Although she treats her son differently from the way the father does, she is very manipulative as well.
The son tries to have a normal life. The only almost sweet part of the show is his attempt at a romance with a local girl. Here too, the horrors of his family intrude. He has no role model for a normal relationship so his attempt at one with his putative girlfriend ends in an abysmal failure. The movie certainly lets you know that good grades are not enough and success can not be measured strictly by the college your child can get in.
This is a movie that I will remember for quiet a while. It is so controversial, I will make no recommend to see it or not. I will give it a thumbs up and award it ***. It has no MPAA rating. My guess, given that there is very little nudity in the show, it would have gotten an R; nevertheless, I think it deserves an NC-17, and I do not think it is appropriate for kids period. The movie runs 1:39.
ADDENDUM You may have seen this movie on CNN or read about it in the Wall Street Journal. Many people are up in arms over it. The reason is that it was funded by you and I, i.e., the funding came from the National Endowment for the Arts (and from a similar organization in NY State). There is a concern that the government has no business funding movies about incest. Frankly, although I am glad I saw the movie, I do not believe the government has any business spending our money making movies at all and so I agree with them.
**** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable.
REVIEWED WRITTEN ON: September 8, 1994
Opinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews