Art of Submission Movie Based on a True Story
Review: 'Submission' Plunges Into a Campus Sex Scandal
- Submission
- Directed by Richard Levine
- Drama
- R
- 1h 46m
"Submission" tells a tale of the dangers of temptation, and some viewers may take trouble avoiding the temptation to care for it every bit an op-ed rather than a piece of work of imagination. Even though it's based on a book published 18 years ago, and draws inspiration from a flick from 1930 (itself based on a 1905 novel), the timeliness of this movie, written and directed by Richard Levine, might strike you every bit downright unnerving.
A eye-aged writer teaching at a liberal-arts college has sex with a student and is engulfed in a scandal that wrecks his marriage and his career. Is he villain or victim? Another predatory monster or a martyr to cultural sensitivities run amok? Is the way his story is told evidence of an anti-feminist backfire or a bold indictment of witch-hunting excess?
As if in anticipation of heated, pre-hashtagged answers to these questions, Francine Prose, whose book "Blueish Affections" is Mr. Levine'due south source, recently published an essay in The Paris Review inviting viewers to concentrate on the specificity and complication of the story rather than looking for an like shooting fish in a barrel argument. That is good advice, though it may testify hard to follow, at least if yous concentrate on the obvious themes of sex and power. But there is more than to this relate of campus misbehavior than he said/she said, and more humor than indignation in the telling. At its best — which is to say when it follows the sharp angles and sly nuances of Ms. Prose's prose nearly closely — "Submission" is less an erotic melodrama than a comedy of literary manners.
The narrator is Ted Swenson (Stanley Tucci), the success of whose beginning book earned him a instruction job, a temporary gig that has lasted more than than a decade. His married woman, Sherrie (Kyra Sedgwick), works at the educatee health service. They accept a grown daughter (Colby Minifie) who is not her begetter'south biggest fan. That status is claimed past Angela Argo (Addison Timlin), an undergraduate in Ted'due south fiction workshop who asks him to accept a await at a novel she is writing.
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What happens next is tawdry, anticipated, queasy-making and too ofttimes funny, though not for the Swensons. Mr. Tucci is the well-nigh unflappable of actors, which makes Ted's inevitable and dramatic flapping all the more terrible and amusing to witness. He is a mannerly guy, to exist sure, but also smug and self-pitying. Whether or not he entirely deserves what he eventually gets, his complacency and passivity set him up for a fall.
But "Submission" isn't just his story. Angela is in many ways more interesting, even though, at the end, her motives are flattened in the interest of a narrative payoff. Ted is taken with her writing, and as well with her naïve, admiring eagerness for his blessing. She writes virtually sex with older men, in her novel and in an before volume of poems, in a way that seems calculated to trigger inappropriate fantasies in the heed of a creatively frustrated, self-consciously aging instructor marooned in academia.
Ted is an easy marking, and hardly an unwilling participant in his own ruin. He is less pathetic than the professor played past Emil Jannings in Josef von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel" (which serves as both a model for "Submission" and signal of reference within it), and Angela is hardly a siren in the mold of Marlene Dietrich'southward cabaret singer. Simply Angela does turn out to be amoral, manipulative and quack, traits that make her both a caricature of feminine guile and a promising fiction writer — perhaps more fully committed to the fine art than her vain, bumbling teacher.
Unfortunately, Mr. Levine, directing his second characteristic afterward working mainly in television (on "Masters of Sexual practice" and "Nip/Constrict," among other series), is a lesser artist than Ms. Prose. "Submission" feels more like an act of devotion, or peradventure of submission, than a costless-standing accommodation. The satire is cautious and the emotions restrained, so that what should be a swirl of lust, ambition, recrimination and bureaucratic absurdity rises merely to genteel, nervous laughter and mild discomfort. The actors all do their best — Ms. Timlin manages the difficult pull a fast one on of switching back and forth between innocence and its opposite — just a crucial element of intensity is missing. By the end, the stakes seem footling, even though families and livelihoods are in play and large ideas hover in the background.
Can a movie exist provocatively timid? Clumsy and coy at the aforementioned fourth dimension? The more you think most "Submission," the less relevant it looks. Which may represent a pyrrhic kind of vindication. In that location's aught here that'southward actually worth arguing about.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/movies/submission-review-stanley-tucci.html
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