Acrimony
Taraji P. Henson is worthy of better than this film. Having starred as the hero in “Hidden Figures” and the antihero on “Empire,” she’s shown she can handle award winning roles. But in this Tyler Perry movie, she’s a mad black woman a walking cliché whose uncontrollable rage is a well known threat to her own safety and others’. Just because her character speaks against stereotypes of angry black women doesn’t mean she isn’t one.
If nothing else, Perry knows how to cast his movies. Henson could read the dictionary and make it entertaining.
“Acrimony” is about bitterness and anger, but there isn’t much else to say. After a brief and stilted court scene, Melinda (Henson) is smoking and talking where an unseen psychiatrist should be sitting. She tells her story in voiceover of the man (Lyriq Bent) who took her love, money and mother’s house from her for his pet science project. Then his luck changes just when they were at their lowest point, and suddenly she can’t let go of the past as her rage consumes her more fiercely each day.
Henson has worked with Perry before (on movies such as “The Family That Preys” and “I Can Do Bad All by Myself”), so she knows he likes dramatics. And here she gives them to him: In “Acrimony,” Henson goes from cold and calculating to screaming and hitting crazy all too frequently for us to keep up.
In one notable scene, she sits in a chair with her legs crossed, fuming mad at the man in her life, but does nothing but take long puffs from a cigarette and talk; as the plumes of smoke diffuse forcefully in front of her face, it looks like she’s burning up from the inside out like something explosive could happen any second. Hell hath no fury like Henson scorned. We’re meant to cheer her quest for revenge to an extent.
In a Tyler Perry morality play, good Christians are always rewarded and bad people in life get what’s coming to them. The message is muddled in “Acrimony.” Yes, there’s punishment in store for the woman who goes blind with rage and obsession, but she’s a woman who needs help, not judgment. She’s in court-ordered therapy for a reason; when she leaves, the shrink casually asks, “Have you heard of Borderline Personality Disorder?”
Perry brushes it off, because he’d rather the story hit a melodramatic crescendo. Even the audience at my screening wasn’t having it: When the credits rolled, some people yelled “that’s it?!” at the screen. A man in my row shook his head and told his date Melinda deserved what she got.
I’m unsure whether she got a fair hearing, Your Honor. And as chaotic as Melinda’s story is, it still makes more sense than some of the visual aspects in “Acrimony.” It was like the movie had been dipped in purple paint and washed out half the scenes. In my screening, they left the dreaded 3D lens on the projector, so it looked even dimmer than Perry probably intended.
The first time we see a check for a significant amount of money, it’s so blurry someone in the audience asked if anyone could see how much it was for. Only one person replied: “It’s got a lot of zero’s!” Every once in a while, the low budget production values show up to remind you that you’re watching an overlong episode of a soap opera. There are bad green screens and actors who look under-rehearsed and enough drone footage of the Pittsburgh waterfront to double as a travel ad.
Are we supposed to cheer for the wronged woman or was her poor guy just an unlucky dope? With this much internal conflict I’m not sure what this movie wants to say. Perry’s maltreatment of his morally ambiguous character is excessive, and if Melinda is mentally ill then that treatment is cruel. Henson will be fine; I just hope she can bounce back with better direction.
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