MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Spanking’: An Offbeat, Daring Directorial Debut

“Spanking the Monkey,” the first feature by writer-director David O. Russell, is an odd choice for a debut film--even by the odd standards of American independent cinema. It’s a whimsical black comedy about incest, and it never lets up. The matter-of-factness of Russell’s approach is harrowing and also--this is the odd, daring part--funny. He keeps his camera on an even keel as he dispassionately records the wayward passions of his people.

Ray Aibelli (Jeremy Davies) is an MIT freshman who is called home from a summer internship with the Surgeon General to care for his bedridden mother (Alberta Watson) while his errant traveling salesman father (Benjamin Hendrickson) conveniently hits the road. Ray is miserable about the change in his summer plans; he doesn’t want to be back in the suburbs, which he’s been trying to escape.

He’s trying to escape his parents, too. His father, who gives the boy boot-camplike instructions about taking care of the dog, his mother and the car, has no feeling for Ray’s ambitions to become a doctor. His mother, Susan, her leg in a cast, lolls about her bedroom like a blitzed empress. As if for sport--to relieve the boredom--she moves closer and closer to Ray’s privacies. She asks him to scrub her back, to prop her up while she takes a shower.

Ray seems alternately blank-faced and razor-sharp. He’s the kind of very bright science maven who doesn’t comprehend his own emotional circuitry. Russell makes us recognize the boy’s conflicts even as Ray doesn’t; we watch as he moves imperceptibly, inevitably toward his mother’s clutches.

What Ray and his mother do, along with its repercussions, is presented as all-of-a-piece with the Aibelli’s larger human comedy. It’s the logical extension of the sultry love-hate horror at the heart of the family’s functional dysfunctionalism.

Ray is sexually unawakened prior to his woozy, boozy encounter with his mother. He masturbates in the bathroom-- spanking the monkey is slang for masturbation--while the family dog scratches at the door. He has a tingly tussle with a local high school girl (Carla Gallo) that leads to something a bit more ferocious than either of them bargained for. But his mother--she’s such a casual monster--wades right into the boy’s Oedipal entanglements. She gives him her version of a college tutorial. He gets his summer internship.

Russell has an adept visual sense but what really distinguishes “Spanking the Monkey” is the acting. Russell is unusual among first-time directors in his ability to mold and shape performance. Ray isn’t some goggle-eyed twerp; he’s a quirky, funny boy in pain. His mother is in pain, too, which she inflicts with abandon--with innocence, almost--on her son. Davies and Watson are both extraordinary. They’re like a creepy Jean Cocteau couple in home-grown suburbia U.S.A. The ending of “Spanking the Monkey” is a large letdown, and the film could be even wiggier and more disturbing, but it’s much more than a promising first feature. Russell bears watching.

* MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes graphic mother-son incest scenes.

‘Spanking the Monkey’

Jeremy Davies: Raymond Aibelli Alberta Watson: Susan Aibelli Benjamin Hendrickson: Tom Aibelli Carla Gallo: Toni A Fine Line Features release. Writer-director David O. Russell. Producer Dean Silvers. Executive producers Stanley F. Buchtal. Cinematographer Michael Mayers. Editor Pamela Martin. Costumes Carolyn Greco. Production design Susan Block. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* Playing at the Nuart, Santa Monica Boulevard at the San Diego Freeway, West Los Angeles; (310) 478-6379.