Delayed Reaction: Secretary

Premise: A woman's new job at a law office unlocks a kinky relationship between her and her boss.

Is Maggie Gyllenhaal underappreciated or appropriately appreciated?* She has one Oscar nomination, even though it's probably for the wrong movie (Crazy Heart). She's collected an Emmy nomination and four Golden Globe nominations (1 win) across film and TV. She's had a few Oscar close-calls. She doesn't actually work as much as you'd think, which makes those numbers look a little better. I have a hard time putting her in a tier though. Compared to her Mona Lisa Smile contemporaries, she has less of an underappreciated argument than Kirsten Dunst who fully deserves more recognition. I'd say she's had the better career than Julia Stiles or Ginnifer Goodwin so far. I don't know. 

*I will not accept an overappreciated verdict in my presence.

In my opinion, she's always great. She just has the problem of taking the right roles for the wrong films. Her big movies are girlfriend or wife roles (The Dark Knight, White House Down, World Trade Center). I love her eternally for Stranger Than Fiction, but that movie was too marred by genre confusion over casting Will Ferrell and many people's inability to separate it from Charlie Kaufman comparisons. Her best roles are in movies and shows that have a hard time getting awards attention. She's a reckless addict with a history of being molested in Sherrybaby. She's a prostitute turned porn film director in The Deuce. In Secretary, her breakout role, she's a BDSM enthusiast. Frankly, she was probably one line of coke from losing her Crazy Heart nomination in 2009. 

I remember when Secretary came out. It was a big coming out for Maggie Gyllenhaal. Her only calling card before that was a small role in Donnie Darko, which was still growing to cult status. Secretary was the right mix of strong performance and buzzy subject matter to make her the most popular performance to have no chance of an Oscar nomination that year. I'm not sure why it took me so long to see this movie. If I want to be really reductive about it, it's a movie with boobs in it that came out when I was 15. That was the whole game back then. Still, somehow, I missed it, and my love of Maggie Gyllenhaal grew regardless. So, I was excited to go back to where it started.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is great in Secretary. She plays an odd mix of innocence, shame, kink, and eventually pride. I fully see why she came out of this with so much buzz. I wish I could say I liked the rest of the movie as much.* James Spader is fine in it. I needed to increase the volume on my TV repeatedly because I kept missing what he was saying. It's definitely fun to think about this as a continuation of his sex, lies & videotapes character. There's a TV Movie quality to the filmmaking which I unfairly counted against it. I know I should be more forgiving of small budgets, but the movie really did just seem cheap. Maggie Gyllenhaal is the thing that makes it work, which is OK since it is a character spotlight movie. The BDSM of it all still feels a little scandalous nearly 2 decades later, which is an accomplishment. Then again, this does sort of play like the defense of every person who has been #MeToo-ed ("See, some women actually like it"). 

*Full disclosure: I saw this movie in bed with a significant hangover, so some percentage of my negative feelings of the movie came from that no doubt. 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend