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Acrimony
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This is a mighty strange film. At a somewhat grinding
two hours, it advertises an ambition to push beyond a mere
genre-thriller-template into … what? Testament? Confession? Lars von Trier
psychodrama? It’s hard to tell what investment writer-director Tyler Perry (“Forbes listed him as the highest paid
man in entertainment”, says Wikpedia) has in this material – and it may be best
to never know.
It’s a “woman wronged” revenge tale (the poster
blares: “Hell Hath No Fury”) – sort of. It begins with Melinda (Taraji P.
Henson – who Time listed as “one of
the hundred most influential people in the world”, source ditto) getting chewed
out in court by a judge for harassment of the couple formed by her ex-husband
Robert (Lyriq Benr) and his new partner, Diana (Crystle Stewart); and then
undergoing a mandatory psychiatric session. Her sofa-prone retelling of the
past that led to her sorry state – “I remember every day of it!”, she cries,
and the film makes you believe that – triggers a long flashback.
And here’s where it starts getting strange – and
potentially even interesting. Melinda’s voice-over narration tells you
everything as we are seeing it, fills in everything, comments on everything,
and interprets everything – to the point where you start to doubt its veracity.
She piles on, minute by minute, shot by shot, the retrospective accusations,
the condemnations, the regret, the self-flagellation, the masochism … We hear,
over and over, about what an absolute shit Robert is, what a cheat and a liar,
what a hopeless dreamer, what an unworking bum, what a money-grubbing leech
sucking away her family nest-egg … and that leeching part comes illustrated
with running maths sums charting the degradation of her bank account printed on
screen. I am all for cinematic excess, but this struck even me as an excessive
detail. But it’s classical subtlety compared with the insane over-sell of that
voice-over narration.
By the time this voice had droned on for maybe 30 or
40 minutes, as it seemed – tracing the young love and swift descent into
marital despair of Melinda and Robert (played in this section by Ajiona Alexus
and Antonio Madison) – I was expecting a daring shift, De Palma or Fincher
style, into a radically different POV: maybe we were about to get the whole
shebang so far replayed from his perspective, or something similar. But that
would leave us stranded with the young actors, not our stars. So …
Something odder starts to happen. Gradually, so
gradually, the film starts to peel off from its main narrational line, to
cleave away from Melinda’s POV – even though all of that is still going on at
an increasingly hysterical intensity. We start to follow Robert in scenes that
Melinda cannot witness, of which she knows or comprehends nothing. And, in
these scenes, we see that Robert – while remaining something of a pathetic
dreamer, spineless guy and goddamn fool – is actually not lying, sleeping
around with Diana (I shall return to her place in the film’s strange scheme of
things), deliberately blowing money, or any of that which Melinda is
saying/projecting. Here, after a long ‘woman’s film’ detour, we are returning
to a generic staple of thrillers: the crazily jealous, violently angry woman who
is fast on her way to becoming a dangerous banshee. What a long, strange road
we had to take to reach her!
I won’t keep chugging through the plot, for the sake
of anyone who wants to see the movie relatively fresh – its weirdness on this
level, at least, is worth experiencing with virginal eyes and ears. But I can
note some other intriguing or nutty things about it.
Like the famous “stages of grieving” that were once
fashionably woven into the social text of comedies and dramas alike (Bob
Fosse’s All That Jazz [1979] expertly
milked the template both ways), Acrimony is constructed on what I have seen described (Wikipedia again) as an “emotional
spectrum”. Each point on this spectrum – Acrimony, Sunder, Bewail, Deranged and
Inexorable, which is the most illogical, Borgesian-dictionary chain imaginable –
comes with its own title and list of defining synonyms. However, it takes so
long (an hour?) to reach the second of these items that one shudders in fear
that it will take five hours, at least, to get through the whole sequence.
Some things are really stretched out in this movie,
while others never to seem to change one iota, even across constant repetitions
and an epic narrative chronology. Strangeness-plus is the dead-on result. There
is a bold moment of ellipsis: almost 20 years of a bad marriage in which – the
image and that bloody voice-over tell us – absolutely nothing advanced, and
stasis killed everything. (No kids to mark the passing years! – she actually
says this.) Now the older actors can step in front of the mirror (literally)
and take back the screen. They look haggard, defeated, alienated. Around them
hovers Melinda’s unlovely, Fassbinder-like family clan: snoops, gossips,
moralists, ‘interventionists’. They are all horrible, like Wicked Sisters from
a grotesque fairy tale. There’s a random guy who Melinda beds for consolation
for one night only, but he has – dear me – a “small dick”. (“When a man comes,
the truth comes out”: not a bad line, that.) But, at a certain point far along
the path, you actually start feeling a little sorry for this whole family, and
especially for Robert, having to suffer the “deranged” Melinda. That’s curious
in itself, given where and how the film starts out.
Back to the time-structuring of the piece, and its
crazy air of eternal return. OK, 20 years fly by. But, every week of that
entire time, Robert has been petitioning to win some kind of “lottery” run
(it’s obviously a perennial scheme) by the visionary benefactor of some vague
corporation – and if Robert wins, his invention (a battery) will be patented,
produced, marketed, etc, and he will surely become rich. Melinda,
understandably, doubts the wisdom of Robert putting his life (and earning
capability) on hold for two decades as he fiddles in his room with cables and blows
out the home’s electrical circuits in pursuit of this mad, hopeless,
impractical dream. At one point, a representative of the corporation rings to
inform Robert that he has been deemed a “security risk” and cannot contact or
come anywhere near the building. Which seems a sensible move on the company’s
part.
Here’s where the figure of Diana gets back into it.
She was the naked, young babe inside the trailer that Melinda tried to destroy,
all those years ago, when she realised her man was fooling around inside it.
Now she’s back … and, in a wonderful coincidence of fate, working high up inside
the very corporation from which Robert is trying to win blessings! It’s she who
first brings on the restraining order … but then, actually looking at his plans
for the first time in corporate history, she realises: he is a genius! This is where everything turns around, massively
and queasily. For from there – past the point where Melinda has misread all the
signs and demanded a divorce – Diana and Robert will reunite and become a couple.
Some things just never change! Except this time, they do get rich on that amazing battery deal, they ride on a luxury
boat, they have wonderful sex, etc. When Melinda confronts Robert (once again)
with the refrain of the wronged, jealous woman – “she’s living my life, she’s
benefitting from the invention I subsidised, she’s making love to my man”, etc
– Robert can only say, in pained exasperation: “But it’s you who divorced me!”
Remember, we had a lengthy sequence devoted to Robert’s days and nights in a
flophouse, with even his mobile phone ignominiously stolen!
Acrimony looks for a quick exit from all
this surrealistic confusion, overstatement and semantic path-swapping. It’s one
of those thrillers (eventually) where we are whisked away from the final image
as fast as a soaring crane – reframing the whole in a dramatic overhead angle
before the ultimate fade-out and musical decrescendo – can take us. And before
it just as rapidly disappears from my consciousness forever, I commit these
perplexed notes to posterity.
MORE Perry: Nobody's Fool © Adrian Martin June 2018 |
