THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 77
ing, “It’s not the right time to make
another baby.” Hark to the horrid man!
Yet the movie persuades you, and
bears you along. It may lack historical
grounding—though Mary and Char
lotte were certainly friends, the existence
of any further intensity is pure, indeed
wild, supposition—but it feels emotion
ally earthed, and, far from rising above
the spartan brutishness of the early
scenes, Lee digs deeper still. Watch Mary,
back at the beach, squatting down to
pee. (Didn’t Winslet resort to alfresco
urination in “Holy Smoke,” back in 1999?
Does her contract forbid her to use an
inside lavatory, or something?) She stands
up, wipes her hands, unwraps a pastry,
tears it in two, and offers half to Char
lotte, who, for some reason, declines it.
As the weeks pass, however, the younger
woman is pulled downward, away from
the ladylike and into the rough stuff of
life; there’s an amazing moment, won
derfully played by Ronan, when she en
ters the house with a bucket of coal,
laughs, begins to weep, and slips to the
floor, lost in confusion at her own feel
ings, with her fine dress covered in smuts.
And so to bed. Nothing is solved or
soothed, in Lee’s film, by the making
of love. Ravenous and frantic, it serves
only to remind both Mary and Char
lotte of their hopeless predicament, and
there are halfcomic echoes of their reg
ular toil, with Mary, on her knees, lift
ing Charlotte’s skirts in a fast fumble,
just as she raised her own at the base
of a cliff; going down looks like climb
ing up. Lee’s boldest move is to cut
straight from the final night of carnal
ity to the demise of a loved one, and
thus to the sight of Mary laying out the
body, as custom demands—dutifully
clothing the corpse, with its cold stiff
feet, only hours after shedding her own
nightgown in Charlotte’s heated em
brace. Here, I think, is the heart of this
yarn: not what it has to say about the
overtight lacing of society, but the alarm
ing clarity with which it addresses the
elemental. As the land meets the ocean,
so death meets desire, and “Ammonite”
makes no bones about them.I
t is nine years since “Martha Marcy
May Marlene” came out. My ner
vous system has recovered in the in
terim, but only just. That film, whose
heroine was drawn into the coils of a
cult, was written and directed by Sean
Durkin—his fulllength début, would
you believe. Only now has he returned
to the fray; his latest movie, “The Nest,”
is no less serpentine, but what encircles
the characters, squeezing the joy out of
them, is money.
Ronald Reagan is in the White
House, deregulation is the rage, and
Rory O’Hara ( Jude Law), a commod
ities broker, decides to move from Amer
ica to England. He’s on a treasure hunt,
as it were, and he’s confident that his
family—his wife, Allison (Carrie Coon);
their daughter, Samantha (Oona Roche);
and her brother, Ben (Charlie Shot
well)—will benefit from the chase. He
rents an old mansion in the country
side, gets the kids into new schools,
commutes to his office in London, and,
to prove how much he cares, arranges
for Allison’s beloved horse Richmond
(played with great sensitivity by Tor
nado) to be shipped over. In one omi
nous shot, we see the O’Hara residence
from Richmond’s point of view, through
the door of his stall, as he neighs andstamps with disquiet. Horse sense tells
us of trouble ahead.
Such images abound in the film;
Durkin has lost none of his composi
tional precision. The family home is ill
lit, illomened, and panelled in dark
wood, with shadows deep enough to
harbor the eavesdropper or to shield the
fearful. No one seeks refuge more than
Ben, who wets the bed and listens in
sorrow to parental rants. Shotwell is the
most affecting presence here, and you
could argue that Ben should have been
the hub of the narrative, like the small
boy in “The Fallen Idol” (1948), seeing
plenty and understanding only scraps.
Instead, we get the grownups. Coon
is as convincing as ever; observe the
speed with which, on waking in the
morning, Allison greets her frustrations
by reaching for a cigarette. As for Rory,
it’s not long before his professional
schemings falter, his funds run dry, and
he winds up pleading for petty cash.
All of which is quite predictable, but
does it make him a selfdeluding, semi
tragic figure, as the movie’s gloom por
tends? (He may, in truth, be little more
than a standardissue dickhead.) And
is Law the right fit for such a role?
Whereas Hugh Grant, another fine
young dandy of yore, has been rejuve
nated by the creases of middle age, Law,
I regret to say, looks glum and soured.
The problem, for “The Nest,” is that
the sourness is present from the start;
he never gives off the bounce and the
thrust that Rory is rumored to possess.
“So, what happened to America?” some
body asks him. What indeed? NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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