"Spanking the Monkey" is an independent film that won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival this past January. Billed as a comedy about incest, the film is only fitfully comic but it is most certainly about incest.
How this picture managed to win the Audience Award is anybody's guess, however. In fact, any other award from the festival would seem more logical, since Sundance's juries routinely honor the weird and unpleasant. But the Audience Award is supposedly the result of balloting, as audience members leave the screenings. And the winner has always been something that could be tolerated it not embraced by mainstream moviegoers. If ever there was a Sundance award that seemed suspect, this is it.
The story has hapless young medical school student Raymond (Jeremy Davies) returning home for what he thinks is a weekend stay, just prior to beginning an important internship in the surgeon general's office in Washington. But his obnoxious, controlling father informs him that he must stay home for several weeks to care for his lonely, neglected mother (Alberta Watson), who is bedridden after fracturing her leg.
So, while Dad is on the road, attending sales meetings and picking up prostitutes, Raymond feeds, bathes, dresses and massages his mother. And though it doesn't actually happen until late in the film, it is evident from the first few minutes that Raymond will succumb to his mother's seductive charms.
The first two-thirds of the film offer a number of comic moments, as Raymond tries to care for the unruly family dog, encounters a seductive teenage girl in the neighborhood and brings in his silly aunt so he can head to Washington. Then, when Raymond and Mom finally get together, the film, rightfully, becomes deadly serious.
Unfortunately, the film has no moral center. In the end, the audience is likely to ask, "What's the point?" Yes, incestuous relationships do exist. But if you're going to make a movie about one, you'd better have some insight or dramatic core to your material. This film has neither.
"Spanking the Monkey" is not rated but is in R-rated territory with sex, nudity, profanity, vulgarity, violence and drugs.