Spanking The Monkey

DVD Review: Spanking The Monkey (1994)

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. This film is not about incest. It’s a film with incest in it, but it’s not a po-faced, Mike Leigh drama where people bang themselves off walls and shout at one another because their souls are tortured with images they just shouldn’t have. No, it’s pretty funny.

   

Not that I’m suggesting we should just sit back and watch it over Sunday lunch with grandma. It’s just that Spanking The Monkey is not a sex comedy, or a farce, or a kitchen-sink drama. It’s strange, quirky, and off the beaten track. In short, it’s a David O. Russell movie.

   

Russell, who seems to have become notorious for directing dingbat stories with pretty boys in them, was always thought of as the next genius auteur of indie film-making. That promise hasn’t really been fulfilled, since most of his major-label pictures have been greeted with lukewarm reviews and almost uniform bafflement. If many mainstream reviewers had watched this, his debut, they might have discovered an odd tale about an uptight student who gets a bit friendlier with his mother than he intended to.

   

High-flying med student Ray Aibelli (Jeremy Davies) is due in Washington for the summer, where he’s bagged a prestigious internship. However, his travelling salesman father (Benjamin Hendrickson) forces him to stay at home and look after his mother Susan (Alberta Watson), who’s broken her leg. Right from the off, the frustrated Ray is looking to delegate his responsibility and get rid of all his parent-related tension.

   

The problem is that Ray can’t get his rocks off in any way, shape or form. The only female action around the place is his neighbour’s daughter Toni (Carla Gallo), who’s still in high school; his mates are all doing manual work and consider him to be a sad loser; his dad keeps on his back by telephone, the people in Washington really want him to be there, and he can’t perform the activity that inspired the title of the film because the dog keeps scratching at the bathroom door.

   

Over the summer days Ray gets more and more put upon – nagged, confused and frustrated, he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going (no pun intended). One evening, watching telly with his mother, twin frustrations combine and there, the camera goes black. There are scenes of aftermath, where Ray tries to strangle his mother and the dog goes missing, but they’re more comedic than you might imagine.

   

It goes without saying that Spanking The Monkey won’t be to everybody’s taste. There’s no nudity, and nobody’s a sex freak, but that doesn’t stop an incestual act being a major part of the narrative. But at its heart, Spanking The Monkey is about a young boy’s confusion over his relationships rather than two people doing something they regret. It’s up to you if you can stomach the thought of a mother sleeping with her son and then trying to put it behind her like a dose of flu.

   

You might remember Jeremy Davies as the green Corporal Upham from Saving Private Ryan. He treads a similar path here – nervous, put-upon and scared. He’s handed a difficult role, being the peg everyone hangs their own neuroses on, but he makes a decent fist of it without being overly-dramatic.

   

Watson as intelligent MILF Susan also plays a challenging role in not making us hate her. She’s fairly aloof throughout the picture, but she doesn’t need to show loads of emotion – stuck in bed, drugged up on anti-depressants and painkillers, she obviously does something to regret but she’s only partly responsible. It’s probable that even if the pair were not blood relations, the story and its constituent parts would have remained the same.

   

Quite rightly, Spanking The Monkey has garnered critical praise over the years and it is an indie flick that any self-respecting film fan should see. It’s not fantastic; a little smug at times, maybe, and there’s an elephant in the corner of the screen that just won’t go away in the form of an act of incest.

   

But the location shooting is delicious, and Russell’s direction makes sure the story doesn’t veer off into self-aggrandising and sexual politics. But after watching it, I find myself unwilling to use the phrases ‘rites of passage’ and ‘coming of age’ because they make me feel slightly weird.

Chris Stanley