Like Michael Haneke’s films, Michael (2011) depicts disturbing, depraved subject matter with a tone of sterile detachment, but the film lacks Haneke's uncompromising curiosity into people and power structures. Director Markus Schleinzer, who was Haneke's casting director on some of his best projects, generates suspense solely on the inherent perversity of the scenario and what results is a movie just skilled enough to leave a bad taste in your mouth: an empty provocation.
Plotless, the film is ostensibly a character study about a nebbish thirty-something pedophile (Michael Fuith) who imprisons and sexually abuses a young boy in the basement dungeon of his middle class house, a story that echoes the Fritzl case. The problem is, the film's characterizations of abuser and victim alike comport with superficial stereotypes. The boy, Wolfgang is a one-dimensional mop-topped kid with impeccable manners and a touch of resilience; he registers as an adult's construction of a heroic victim - and his childlike qualities are conveyed solely through scenes of him playing with toys. I imagine the psychology of a child suffering systematic abuse to be messy and complex and horrific and almost impossible to convey through Schleinzer's blunt, literal style given, among other reasons, the logistical hurdles of coaching a young actor about such wretched subject matter. By contrast, the 2009 film, Mysterious Skin uses a highly symbolic, science fiction-inspired language to take on the past and present scars of child abuse survivors in a way that is both far more humane and harrowing. Regardless, Schleinzer's film is not about to blaze the trail on this issue, for better or worse.
There is less reason for why Michael, the pedophile, is so fixed to a caricature of a Chester-the-Molestor weirdo. Fitting to Schleinzer's career as a casting director, the portrayal is really a casting decision more than an investigation; starting with Fuith's dour, balding, schlub appearance, Michael is designed to elicit predictable and single-minded repulsion. The film proceeds primarily of repetitive, dull observations of Michael’s daily domestic routines, which precede or follow acts of offscreen child abuse. The film shows Michael brushing his teeth or Michael singing a bad pop song loudly on the radio, and we are invited to gawk and even to laugh derisively, in the latter case, at monstrous evil in the mundane everyday.
Michael's environment is sterile but comfortable; he works a middle-class desk job, attracts the unwanted friendliness of a coworker, his family seems normal if distant, and he even has a small group of friends to go skiing with. If there is a sick joke here about bourgeois modernity and pedophilia, I missed the punchline, as there appears no through-line between Michael's evil and the environment in which he lives; he is an aberration.
The problem is, people don't exist in vacuums, and every person, no matter how repulsive, is human. Portrayals that convey a degree of complexity, nuance, and/or empathy do not condone their subjects' evil behavior. Catherine Keener's brilliant performance in An American Crime; Dylan Baker in Happiness, Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant; and Rainer Bock in the Schleinzer-cast Haneke film, The White Ribbon, are all worthy depictions of sexually abusive personalities. Michael does not seek to expand our comprehension of people nor put them in a relevant context; it seeks to exploit and disgust. It is more To Catch a Predator than anything in the oeuvre of the Austrian master to whose style it is clearly indebted.
Plotless, the film is ostensibly a character study about a nebbish thirty-something pedophile (Michael Fuith) who imprisons and sexually abuses a young boy in the basement dungeon of his middle class house, a story that echoes the Fritzl case. The problem is, the film's characterizations of abuser and victim alike comport with superficial stereotypes. The boy, Wolfgang is a one-dimensional mop-topped kid with impeccable manners and a touch of resilience; he registers as an adult's construction of a heroic victim - and his childlike qualities are conveyed solely through scenes of him playing with toys. I imagine the psychology of a child suffering systematic abuse to be messy and complex and horrific and almost impossible to convey through Schleinzer's blunt, literal style given, among other reasons, the logistical hurdles of coaching a young actor about such wretched subject matter. By contrast, the 2009 film, Mysterious Skin uses a highly symbolic, science fiction-inspired language to take on the past and present scars of child abuse survivors in a way that is both far more humane and harrowing. Regardless, Schleinzer's film is not about to blaze the trail on this issue, for better or worse.
There is less reason for why Michael, the pedophile, is so fixed to a caricature of a Chester-the-Molestor weirdo. Fitting to Schleinzer's career as a casting director, the portrayal is really a casting decision more than an investigation; starting with Fuith's dour, balding, schlub appearance, Michael is designed to elicit predictable and single-minded repulsion. The film proceeds primarily of repetitive, dull observations of Michael’s daily domestic routines, which precede or follow acts of offscreen child abuse. The film shows Michael brushing his teeth or Michael singing a bad pop song loudly on the radio, and we are invited to gawk and even to laugh derisively, in the latter case, at monstrous evil in the mundane everyday.
Michael's environment is sterile but comfortable; he works a middle-class desk job, attracts the unwanted friendliness of a coworker, his family seems normal if distant, and he even has a small group of friends to go skiing with. If there is a sick joke here about bourgeois modernity and pedophilia, I missed the punchline, as there appears no through-line between Michael's evil and the environment in which he lives; he is an aberration.
The problem is, people don't exist in vacuums, and every person, no matter how repulsive, is human. Portrayals that convey a degree of complexity, nuance, and/or empathy do not condone their subjects' evil behavior. Catherine Keener's brilliant performance in An American Crime; Dylan Baker in Happiness, Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant; and Rainer Bock in the Schleinzer-cast Haneke film, The White Ribbon, are all worthy depictions of sexually abusive personalities. Michael does not seek to expand our comprehension of people nor put them in a relevant context; it seeks to exploit and disgust. It is more To Catch a Predator than anything in the oeuvre of the Austrian master to whose style it is clearly indebted.
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