Secretary (2002)

Secretary arrived in 2002 as a Sundance curiosity, a romantic comedy about spanking that somehow kept its composure. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lee Holloway, freshly discharged from a psychiatric hospital, who types her way into the employ of James Spader's Edward Grey, a lawyer with a fondness for typewriters and corporal correction. The film treats its subject with a steady hand, and the two leads commit fully. What could have been a lurid provocation becomes something closer to a courtship.

On the ledger of social consciousness, the film registers lightly and unevenly. Lee's arc is one of self-determination: she abandons a wedding gown and a decent fiancé for a desk she refuses to leave, insisting on her own strange desires over the conventional arrangement offered to her. That is female agency of a sort, though commentators have rightly observed that the arrangement begins without consent and flatters a lopsided power dynamic. The cast is white, the Florida suburbs are white, and the production designer covered the family home in plastic sheeting to make the point. There is no engagement with race, class, or climate. The scars on Lee's thighs are treated as pathology and backstory, not as a matter of identity or affirmation.

What remains is a modest, sharply observed two-hander, elevated by Gyllenhaal's willingness to play the role without apology. The director's stated hope of normalizing sadomasochistic relationships lends the proceedings a faint thesis, but it is carried by montage, typewriter keys, and Leonard Cohen rather than dialogue. Nobody stands at a lectern. Nobody explains the lesson. A woman who likes dull work meets a man who cannot articulate what he wants, and the classification is unremarkable. That is the achievement.