You can’t spell charm without harm: Michael Fassbender’s fatally flawed men

Stream this selection of films starring the Irish–German actor at SBS On Demand, but be quick! They all leave by the end of March.

Michael Fassbender in ‘The Light Between Oceans’. Source: Entertainment One

Michael Fassbender is easy on the eye. But in his best films he’s also hard on the heart. There have been plenty of handsome actors over the years who’ve occasionally dabbled in using their good looks for evil, but few have worked so hard in their best films to remind us that looks – especially the handsome kind you can’t look away from – can be deceiving.

It’s not even that his characters are outright evil, though he’s more than capable of playing that. It’s that he plays men who are weak, and who get away with being weak because they look so strong. Time and again in movies he arrives as the kind of man that people want to give themselves over to. He shines as someone you can trust to take care of things. And then, time and again, he betrays that trust.

Fish Tank

Betrayal of trust is what makes his role in Fish Tank so heartbreaking; for a little while, he’s exactly the person 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) needs. Her relationship with her mother (Kierston Wareing) is fractured, her little sister is annoying, and life on an Essex housing estate is nothing but dead ends. Her mother’s new boyfriend, Connor (Fassbender) seems like the father figure she didn’t know she needed.

He’s charming, he’s funny, he supports her dreams of becoming a dancer and he takes the sisters on a trip to the country. It’s obvious things are going to go wrong – it’s just that kind of story – but the way Fassbender sells Connor as the kind of man who would seem perfect to a teenager while setting alarm bells ringing for anyone who could look past his looks is gripping. He could be just what Mia needs; he could be the biggest mistake of her life.

Fish Tank is streaming at SBS On Demand. It leaves at 11.59pm, Thursday 31 March.

12 Years A Slave

Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor in ‘12 Years A Slave’. Source: Distributor

In 12 Years A Slave there’s no room for those questions. He plays Edwin Epps, a man who’s let his weaknesses rot his life out from within, and he’s a human nightmare even among slave-owners. A drunken, abusive monster who runs a plantation that’s close to Hell on Earth, when kidnapped New Yorker Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) ends up there, he knows he’s reached the end of the line.

There’s nothing redemptive about Epps; every scene he’s in is a knife-edge of terror as he lashes out at Northup and his other slaves. But Fassbender grounds his evil in all too human emotions, amplifying the horror by playing Epps as merely a once promising man gone sour, a bitter, angry, self-loathing failure – who just happens to have the legal power of life and death over the workforce that he despises.

12 Years A Slave is streaming at SBS On Demand. It leaves at 11.55pm, Thursday 24 March.

The Light Between Oceans

Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander in ‘The Light Between Oceans’. Source: Entertainment One

12 Years A Slave cast Fassbender in a role where everything was on the surface; in The Light Between Oceans he turns everything inward to play Tom, a loving husband broken by the horrors of World War I. Now living as a lighthouse keeper off the coast of Western Australia with his wife Isabel (Alicia Vikander), their life is quiet and settled, the only scar, their failure to have a child. And then a lifeboat washes ashore with a baby on board.

Isabel knows what she wants; Tom knows what’s right. As the story progresses, she remains firm, while he can’t even fully commit to the decision they made. It’d be easy to play Tom as a man too good for the situation he’s caught up in, but Fassbender does something more subtle. Tom can be brave when it’s the easy thing to do, but he doesn’t have the strength required to go against society and do the wrong thing. From the outside, he seems like a decent man; Fassbender plays him from the inside, where his weakness is all too clear.

The Light Between Oceans is streaming at SBS On Demand. It leaves at 11.55pm, Friday 25 March.

A Dangerous Method

In many of his roles, Fassbender plays characters who creep up on moral decay. In A Dangerous Method he invents a whole new kind of bad behaviour, by being the first psychiatrist to sleep with one of his patients. Of course he’s the first; as Carl Jung, he – together with Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) invented it.

In his defence, at the time, breaking taboos was seen as exploring the frontiers of the human mind, and having Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) as a patient sexually aroused by spanking doesn’t really help matters. For once, Fassbender’s skill at playing weak men has an upside; by taking Sabina as his mistress, they help push psychoanalysis beyond Freud’s obsession with sex into a wilder, more primal exploration of the mind. That said, he’s still a Fassbender character – which is to say, he’s not strong enough to leave his wife for her.

A Dangerous Method is streaming at SBS On Demand. It leaves at 11.59pm, Thursday 31 March.

Macbeth

Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender in Justin Kurzel’s ‘Macbeth’. Source: Distributor

All this cowardice, betrayal and brutality has been leading us here: in Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of Macbeth, Fassbender finally gets the role he was born to play. Shakespeare’s classic study of over-reaching ambition finds in Fassbender the perfect actor when it comes to playing seemingly stalwart, upright men with morals in the mud.

Kurzel’s take on the play is bloody, foggy, full of memorable war scenes – where Macbeth gets to show off his public face as the warlord Scotland needs – and striking moments where the cast’s matter-of-fact delivery underlines Macbeth’s brutal rise to power. He’s a ruler who looks like a king and acts like a cur; Fassbender’s blunt, increasingly tormented performance is one for the ages.

Macbeth is streaming at SBS On Demand. It leaves at 11.35pm, Sunday 27 March.

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