Lee (Gyllenhaal) comes home from the nuthouse in time for her sister's wedding. Dad (Stephen McHattie) is a lush, mom (Lesley Ann Warren) is a ball of overweening anxiety, and boyfriend Peter (Jeremy Davies) is irritatingly sensitive; what's a good girl to do but cut herself with a sewing kit to make sense of it all? Finding work with a lawyer who has a permanent help-wanted shingle hung in front of his office, Lee discovers that E. Edward Grey, esq. (James Spader) has a thing for spanking his executive assistants for their typos. Theirs is a match made in heaven.

Shainberg's extremely loose adaptation of Mary Gaitskill's interesting short story "Secretary" is an exercise in anthropology told through the mirror darkly of fetish and the extremes of abnormal behaviour. His sharpest sting the hypodermic Mr. Grey uses to crossbreed his orchid garden, Lee begins as a self-administering cultivator and Grey's next hothouse flower but evolves into something more closely resembling the actualized post-coitus citizenry of Gary Ross' aforementioned black-and-white situation comedy. The picture tackles feminism full-bore first with the fact of its subject matter (is it still subjugation if it's empowering?), then with a witty cameo from a Naomi Wolf-ite bearing a stack of dog-eared dogma before a wedding gown-wearing Lee planted behind Grey's desk. That it pings off the politics is essential; that it discards it for the inconsequence it generally is in human sexual discourse is pitch-perfect.

Secretary's strength and its weakness is its simplicity. It's simultaneously as shocking as it wants to be and not nearly so shocking as it thinks it is. The revelations offered by the film and its closing, fourth-wall breaking shot are the standards set for the defiance of a charge of pornography: when the subject regards the voyeur, a certain degree of prurience is lost with the transfer of the possessor of that gaze. More, Secretary wishes to impart a kind of indictment of the audience--an invitation to reassess one's personal foibles and sex-play against societal norms and the lies of normalcy told in polite company. And while Shainberg's hand, Gyllenhaal, Spader, and Warren are each are spot-on, this particular attack has already been mounted with more alacrity and courage elsewhere.-Walter Chaw

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