Secretary | | Cast : | James Spader, Maggie Gyllenhaal | | Director : | Steven Shainberg | | Studio : | Lions Gate Home Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | January 01, 2002 | | DVD Released Date : | April 01, 2003 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 21, 2005 | | Summary | A good watch.... | Content
 | I LOVE this movie. I saw it a dozen times before I cracked and purchased it. Any fans of James Spader will enjoy "the Secretary". It's a great story about dominance and submission, done it the most classy way. Maggie Gyllenhaal is amazing as Lee Holloway. "The Secretary" is a story about two people who find love and are able to share something most people would see as distrubing or "wrong". Steven Shainberg and Erin Cressida Wilson did an amazing job bringing this short story to the big screen. The movie makes you realize that not everyone has the same idea of what love is, yet, it's all the same. I don't know, just buy it. It's good.
Oh, if you're looking for a movie with a lot of sex scenes and nudity, this isn't for you. (Buy "Crash" with James Spader) It's a classic love story with an edge.
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| Rating | | | Date | July 02, 2005 | | Summary | Not very good | Content
| This film isn't very good. James Spader plays a very strange attorney who like to "play" with the secretaries he contracts to BDSM games. And Maggie Gyllenhaal has enough talent to be a good and not a mediocre actress, like many of the ones we have now, even seeing her naked doesn't makes you feel something. And I found some mistakes in the movie, like see mountains in Florida, when you can clearly see it's California. Bad dialogues and too slow. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 27, 2005 | | Summary | Brilliance for the Mature | Content
| A serious movie that is very well acted. It will compel you. Mature audiences only--not necessarily just by age. This is a movie you cannot quickly forget. Daring--like nothing I had seen before. A secretary into hurting herself physically develops a connection and a powerful DESIRE for her boss that has to be seen to be believed. The movie ends with the most beautiful and poetic imagery that has been burnt into my mind. ...and that song by Lizzie West, I had to look her up and buy the CD.
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| Rating | | | Date | June 01, 2005 | | Summary | a corruption of the author's intent... | Content
| Am I the only reviewer that has read the short story that this film was based on? I've read over fifty of the reviews, and there has been no mention of the source material.
In any case, this movie is based (very loosely) on a short story by Mary Gaitskill, in a book published circa 1989 called "Bad Behavior".
Gaitskill is a phenomenally gifted writer, and much more intelligent than the people who produced and directed this film. I haven't read anywhere what her opinion of the movie is, but I'll tell you mine.
Hollywood regularly takes the works of fiction writers and bastardizes them in order to make them more appealing to audiences. Usually this means juicing something up with more titillation. In this case, they took a dark, Darwinistic look at office politics and sex and turned it into a sweetened, Mary Poppins-in-whips-and-chains postfeminist movie in the vein of "Fatal Attraction", "Pretty Woman", and "Basic Instinct."
Look at it this way: when an author describes a rather repugnant lawyer masturbating behind his secretary as "making furious rodent-like sounds" and "spattering hot muck", do you think she (the author) is sympathetic towards the character?
They turned a seedy (pun intended) low-life lawyer into a matinee idol--James Spader, and made the secretary into an unawakened freethinker, when in the book she was a character with basically no sense of herself at all, and certainly no self esteem.
Maggie Gyllenhaal (lately in the news for speaking her mind about 9-11) is superb in this movie, I'll grant you that. She is a young actress on the rise. But the rest of the cast, including Spader, give very forgettable performances. The movie just isn't that well made, and when you see the director's interviews, you'll understand why.
I would recommend that anyone intrigued by this movie investigate Mary Gaitskill's writing. Besides "Bad Behavior", she wrote a novel called "Two Girls, Fat and Thin" which is an excellent dissection of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Of course, if Hollywood adapted that book for a movie, it would probably come out resembling "Atlas Shrugged".... |
| Rating | | | Date | May 19, 2005 | | Summary | Surprise: "Secretary" is a heartbreakingly beautiful comedy | Content
| The poster art for "Secretary" promises an unsavory blend of titillation and cuteness (check out the soundtrack CD elsewhere on this site; the art is the same). The DVD's artwork makes the movie look even worse: another tiresome entry in the over-populated "Erotic Thriller" genre. Watch the movie itself, however, and discover a film that, for all its humor, for all its erotic hijinks, couldn't be more serious about its theme: We have a truer self within us that we may or may not have the courage to become. Sometimes intimidation comes from outside. Just as frequently, from within.
Both Lee, the title character, and Edward, her boss, come to realize that physical and psychological discipline, humiliation, and pain -for Lee, enduring it, for Edward, administering it - not only stirs them, but is the lynchpin of each one's personality. Neither can be complete until each embraces this truth. Edward initiates the couple's transformation by helping Lee channel the lonely self-aggression that has long made her cut and burn herself into a succession of arcane but steadily more overt B&D scenarios (Their first real "sex act" is Lee's volunteering to dumpster dive for some lost documents before Edward can order her to do so). Lee flourishes as never before, but Edward soon reverts to the shame we sense he has long struggled with. It's up to Lee, the supposedly "passive" half of the couple, to use her increasingly steely confidence in herself --the young woman knows what she wants, who she is, and who Edward is, too-- to complete the transformation. She leads Edward, once and for all, into self-actualization and true love. Thanks to Lee's devotion, Edward is free of self-disgust at last.
The opening scene of "Secretary" drops the viewer into the middle of this narrative. In a shot that will be repeated 55 minutes later, Lee carries out a variety of office duties with poise and efficiency --despite the fact that she is wearing a bizarre and uncomfortable-looking restraint that holds her arms straight out at the shoulders. The first time around the scene seems odd, almost repugnant; Lee lopes with unnerving calm to (longtime David Lynch collaborator) Angelo Badalamenti's creepy score around a unsettlingly baroque office. Then, abruptly, a title card: "six months earlier". The narrative proper begins.
At first, it's unclear what this circuitous opening adds to the story, apart from an element of suspense that might not be if the events unfolded in strict chronological order: the opening scene presents a big "What?"; we wait anxiously to learn the "Why". What other purpose this scene might serve becomes clear with its reprise. By then a subtle understanding of its context is possible. The remarkable Maggie Gyllenhaal imbues Lee with such supple humanity that the viewer has become more than sympathetic, and understands how much this long-suffering, unassumingly brave woman is enjoying herself, arm-restraints and all. The scene is no longer unsettling, but celebratory. The scene hasn't changed. Maybe we have. Director Steven Shainberg, on the DVD commentary track, says he hopes that his film will do for S&M what "My Beautiful Laundrette" did for homosexuality almost 20 years ago-- increase mainstream understanding. Perhaps it will.
On the same commentary track, the film's writer Erin Cressida Wilson says that the uncertain "Um....." Lee utters after Edward has administered the first blow in the justly famous spanking scene is Wilson's "Favorite line". She then chuckles, and modestly refrains from explaining what she means. Why it's good: Although this pivotal scene is fraught with emotion, Lee's tentative "Um....." is the only line of dialogue in it that acknowledges, even obliquely, what is taking place. Unlike the painfully verbose, excruciatingly clever screenwriters who currently plague independent film, Wilson realizes that what people say may be only tangentially related to what they mean, or are thinking, or what's happening, and that great feeling may lurk behind the most banal or fragmentary remark. "Secretary" is one of the strictest, fullest applications of this principle imaginable (Each page of the screenplay must contain one column each for speech and subtext). Never glib, never clever, just smart, "Secretary" is certainly a comedy of some sort, but it contains nothing that exactly qualifies as a joke. Its minimal dialogue leaves wide expanses in which the actors can and must communicate non-verbally. The leads are up to the task. Gyllenhaal ("JILL-in-hall") and the always watchable James Spader make adept use of the full actor's arsenal: facial expression, posture -watch Lee's gait change in the course of the film-, verbal pauses and inflection create a world of meaning beneath deceptively mundane, often monosyllabic, dialogue. Tune into these actors' peculiar wavelength and be spellbound. |
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