The title "Spanking the Monkey" derives from an American slang expression for masturbation. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will doubtless be relieved to learn that no monkeys were spanked during the making of the film.
The Wikipedia entry for the film describes it as a "black comedy", which surprised me. There is little that is comic, even blackly comic, about it. It is rather one of those independent dramas about bickering, self-tormenting, dysfunctional American families. (See also "Lymelife", "Margot at the Wedding", "The Lifeguard" and many others). The main character is Ray Aibelli, a young man in his early twenties. He is a medical student who has just finished his first year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been offered an internship with the Surgeon General's department, a much sought-after appointment, but has had to turn it down, at his father's insistence, to look after his mother who has broken her leg.
Ray has a difficult relationship with his father, Tom, a travelling salesman whose job means he is often away from home. He has little sympathy with Ray's academic aspirations or his choice of medicine as a career and resents having to pay his college fees. Tom's relationship with his wife Susan is equally difficult, and he takes advantage of his frequent absences on business trips to cheat on her with prostitutes.
Ray's relationship with his mother is closer, although he is unhappy about being unable to take up his internship. There is little to do in the small town where he lives. He tries to get in touch with old friends from school, but finds that they are childish and immature with little in common with him. He dates a local teenager, Toni, but she is too young for him and their affair does not get very far. And then comes the development which has made this film notorious. A sexual attraction grows up between Ray and Susan and they have an incestuous relationship.
Some will find the very idea of a film about incest distasteful. This is not just because incest is widely regarded as immoral and is illegal in many countries. There are many other illegal or immoral human activities which do not evoke the same reaction. Murder, for example, is almost universally condemned as the most heinous of all crimes, but there are a vast number of films which involve at least one deliberate killing compared to the very few about incest. It is as if the cultural taboo against incest extended to writing, talking or even thinking about it, whereas we are perfectly free to write, talk or think about murder provided that we do not commit it.
Despite this cultural taboo, there have been some very good films on the subject. The two I am particularly thinking about are Louis Malle's "Le Souffle au Coeur" and Bertolucci's "La Luna", both of which, like "Spanking the Monkey", dealt with mother/son incest. I would not rate David O. Russell's film as highly as either of those, but it does have its points of interest. There are no major stars in it, which is not surprising; even in 1994 a Hollywood big name would not have got out of bed, much less signed up to do a movie, for $200,000, which was the film's entire budget. Nevertheless, you don't always need big names to make a well-acted movie.
All three of the main roles are well played. Benjamin Hendrickson as Tom probably has the easiest part to play because Tom is a straightforwardly unsympathetic character, a cold, selfish and domineering man who always puts his own needs and interests before those of his wife or son. Jeremy Davies as Ray and the late Alberta Watson as Susan have a more difficult task. Their characters, after all, are breaching one of our most basic taboos, and yet it is important that the audience should, if not necessarily sympathise with them, at least be able to understand their motivation. I think that, to a large extent, Davies and Watson succeed in this task. Even if this film is not in the same class as Malle's or Bertolucci's, it is considerably better than many "dysfunctional family" films- certainly better than the three I named in my second paragraph. 6/10.
