Steve McQueen‘s Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that’s entirely about a malignancy — sex addiction — affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light. It’s a bucket of bleak. Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattaan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He’s into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the day, all the film does is show you how damaged and deranged he is. The guy is lost, tangled, doomed.

Act One: Fassbender is one smooth, obsessive, fucked-up dude. Act Two: Fassbender really is a twisted piece of work, you bet. Act Three: Boy, is this guy a mess!

This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do. But Shame has a point, delivered with a methodical intensity, that sinks into your bones. And part of the point is that suppressed memories of incest…nope, I can’t do this. I have to leave for Albuquerque in less than 45 minutes, and it’ll take too many graphs.

But Shame has integrity, and is one of those films, like A Dangerous Method, that you might not like as you watch it but you think about a lot in the hours and days and weeks afterwards.

The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. Fassbender walks around with his dick hanging out and flopping against his upper thigh, and I suppose it ought to be acknowledged that he’s fairly well hung. Carey Mulligan, who plays his effed-up sister, has (a) a longish nude scene in a shower and (b) a song-singing moment that goes on for three or four minutes. I’m obviously not assessing the inner aspects. Another time…sorry.

David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method (Sony Classics, 11.23) is one of those brilliant, highly refined dramas with stirring elevated dialogue that are good for you, like spinach. It’s difficult to truly enjoy films of this sort as you watch them, but they’re hard to forget or dismiss after you’ve left the theatre. In the long or short run all good cinema gains upon reflection.

Keira Knightley in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method

But at the same time A Dangerous Method, which I caught late yesterday morning at the Telluride Film Festival, is a vaguely oppressive thing to sit through. Well-acted but extremely cool, aloof, studied and intellectually driven to a fare-thee-well. I’m not saying it’s going to underperform commercially, but I know what the current in the room was. People were respecting it for the most part, but not having all that great a time.

Written by Christopher Hampton and set mostly in Zurich between the early 1900s and the outbreak of World War I, Method is basically about how the mutually respectful and nurturing relationship between young psychiatrist Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and infallible father figure Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) came apart, largely over Jung’s ill-judged affair with Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a brilliant but unstable young woman who eventually becomes a psychoanalyst herself.

Knightley’s highly agitated, face-twitching performance is fascinating but hard to roll with at times, particularly during the first 20 minutes to half-hour. Cronenberg told her to go for it in terms of facial tics and flaring nostrils and body spasms, etc. She does a jaw-jutting thing that hasn’t been seen since John Barrymore played Dr. Jekyll in the 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the same time Knightley brings a thrilling sexual intensity to the all-too-brief fucking and belt-whipping scenes with Fassbender.

All in all Knightley’s performance is quite a handful — it throws you and pulls you in at the same time. It’s a high-wire, risk-taking thing, and Method really needs to be seen for this alone.

The film is also essential viewing for a magnificent CGI shot of the lower Manhattan skyline as it appeared sometime around 1910 or thereabouts. The instant I saw I gasped and said to myself, “This is what great CG is all about…the kind that doesn’t look like CG at all but knocks your socks off for the realism.”

Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation, a forthcoming Sony Classics release which won the Golden Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, is far and away the finest film I’ve seen at the 2011 Telluride Film Festival…and I didn’t even see the first 40 minutes’ worth. But soon after I slipped into the Chuck Jones theatre early yesterday afternoon I knew I was in the presence of something genuine, compassionate, complex and unflinching. This Iranian film is affecting and profound in a way that transcends nationality and culture and any other obstacle you can think of.

Given the thick-headed reputation of the Academy’s notorious foreign-language branch, it’s conceivable that A Separation might not receive its just due, which would at least be a nomination for a Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar. I’m not predicting that a torch-carrying mob will storm Academy headquarters on Wilshire Blvd. if this fails to happen, but it will be a moment of Profound Industry Shame.

Shot in Teheran, A Separation (previously called Nader and Simin, A Separation) is basically about class and repression and violated honor and families. Particularly two families — a relatively well-to-do one and a lower-class one headed by a hot-tempered husband and a submissive, deeply religious wife. The plot centers on a claim by the latter couple that the pater familias who hired the poor wife to take care of his Alzheimer’s-afflicted dad pushed her down a flight of stairs and caused her to miscarry. Iranian law says this can be rectified with a payoff, which the angry, lower-class husband desperately needs to pay off creditors.

Farhadi is a master filmmaker whose aesthetic focus and talent at this moment sits on a precipice far above the Hollywood efforts of Scorsese-Spielberg. The combination of the simplicity of his technique and the deeply compelling performances (the cast is headed by Leila Hatami, Peyman Moaadi, Shahab Hosseini, Sareh Bayat and Sarina Farhadi) are blended in this instance with a story that hits on a riveting moral-ethical issue. The upshot is a dividend that is socially and psychologically revealing in a way that is truly exceptional.

The Telluride AARP crowd was on its feet and applauding like mad when the lights came up following yesterday’s showing.

Yes, going apeshit over two-thirds of a film is ill-advised. I made that mistake when I raved about Rodrigo Garcia’s Mother and Child, only to realize that the last 30% of the drama, which I was forced to miss, didn’t work as well as the first 70%. But endings are everything, and any film working as well as A Separation does for the last two-thirds = unassailable. I don’t care if the first 40 minutes is about the use of donkey turds for fertilizer. I’ll see the part I missed at the Toronto Film Festival or in New York late this month.

Sony Classics will release A Separation on 12.30.11.

The absolute post-production disaster that is Kenneth Lonergan‘s Margaret will finally open on 9.30, a full six years after it began principal photography. The problem with releasing films this old is that they look like period pieces. The present-tense Anna Paquin in True Blood is a blonde, lithe, aerobicized hottie. But in Lonergan’s film she’s chubby and dark-haired. How odd that Fox Searchlight chose to point this out on the one-sheet.

From the film’s Wiki page:

“Court documents show Margaret started filming in New York in September 2005 and wrapped photography about three months later. It was in the editing room, interviews and court records show, that everything fell apart.

“Even though he had made only one movie, Lonergan enjoyed ‘final cut’ status as a director, a level of creative autonomy typically enjoyed by A-listers such as Steven Spielberg. That status meant that as long as certain conditions were met (including a running time not to exceed 150 minutes), Lonergan could personally dictate the film’s final form — neither the studio nor Gilbert could take it away from him.

“Why Lonergan couldn’t finish a version of the film he liked is central to the dispute. Even Lonergan’s supporters say he is an exacting perfectionist who struggled to find the movie within the footage he had shot. Gilbert’s advocates say (and his lawsuit alleges) that the producer gave Lonergan countless chances to finish the movie but that Lonergan failed to take anyone’s counsel.

“‘Previews and screenings were scheduled throughout 2006, yet they had to be canceled time and again due to Lonergan’s refusal or inability to produce a cut of the picture,’ Gilbert argued in his suit against Lonergan and Fox Searchlight.

“A number of producers and editors — including Scott Rudin, Sydney Pollack and Thelma Schoonmaker — have tried but failed to help Lonergan complete his movie. Gilbert in his legal papers says that Lonergan ‘failed to keep regular hours’, that producer Pollack cut short an editing session ‘having become disgusted by, and frustrated with, Lonergan’s unprofessional and irrational behavior’, and that Lonergan ‘did not listen to, or implement’ editor Schoonmaker’s suggestions.

“Gilbert said that when Fox Searchlight refused to pay for additional post-production costs, he footed the bill. At some point around that time, Lonergan borrowed more than $1 million from actor and close friend Matthew Broderick (who has a small part in Margaret) in an attempt to complete the editing of the movie, according to a person close to the production.”

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond has just reported about a conversation with a Fox Searchlight staffer.

“When I asked another staffer about the long five-year delay of Kenneth Lonergan‘s Margaret, now finally getting a limited release on September 30th, I just got a look of pure frustration. Contractually the film, which once ran more than 3 hours, must come in under 2 1/2 hours. Official time I am told is now 2 hours, 29 minutes, and 40 seconds. ‘There’s a good movie in there somewhere,’ the staffer said. Not everything can be a winner.”