I miss dirty movies. We don’t get many of them anymore. This is one of the few good ones so far of the new millennium to take sex as its subject and render kinky acts as exotic fun. It gets sentimental eventually, but delivers it with enough camp to ease the pain.
Also, none of that takes away from the strength of the rest of the film, in which a fetching Maggie Gyllenhaal is a sanitarium outpatient and pathological self-cutter who takes a job as a secretary under ultra-awkward lawyer James Spader, who can’t keep his sexual kinks out of the office.
He gradually observes sweet little Maggie, tests her, feels her out and then initiates her into the S&M way of life. Much spanking, a dollop of bondage and lots of sexy submission follows while she melts like butter in a hot skillet over it all. Meanwhile, he’s wracked with guilt about his preoccupations.
One smart thing about this film is that it never burdens us with any tedious backstory to explain why these people are what they are. It simply lets them be. There’s a scene here where James Spader kisses Maggie Gyllenhaal all over her body while she, with a dreamy smile on her face, asks him random questions about himself (“Where did you go to high school?”, “What was your mother like?”)—and he answers none of them. In that same scene, she also tells us via narration that she’s revealed her most painful and intimate secrets to Spader—but we don’t get to hear them.
Good. We don’t need to know any of those things. They’re not important. This is not a film about diagnosing, explaining and treating S&M fetishes. It’s about enjoying them. It’s about accepting yourself. If you get a little charge in your loins watching James Spader smack Maggie Gyllenhaal on the ass, this film wants you to know that you’re not wrong.