Robert keeps draining her finances (she’s forced to mortgage the home she inherited from her mother), and by sticking with him she appears to be colluding in the slow-motion destruction of her life. And the effect is to shore up the suspicion that Melinda is waiting around for a pipe dream that’s destined not to happen. After all, if he were really such a brilliant inventor, surely he could manage to land an appointment! Surely someone would want to buy his battery! There’s a racial-political subtext here (a black man without connections has no way to be heard), but Robert comes off as a lazy and depressed mad scientist. The company has a lottery system for looking at potential clients, and Robert spends years - like, literally, a decade - standing outside the corporate headquarters, trying to wrangle an appointment.īut if his crusade seems demented (and it sort of does), it’s mostly in an unintentional, cut-rate-filmmaking way. He and Melinda stay together, and Robert, now played by the intriguingly tense actor Lyriq Bent, is working on an invention that he says will make them rich: a self-charging battery he dreams of selling to the Prescott company. This is a little too much sleazy behavior too early on, but the real trouble with Robert is that he’s a flake and a sponger. Then she shows up at the grungy RV he lives in, and - yes - he’s sleeping with someone else. At least, until her mother’s funeral, when he exploits her grief to seduce her and then gets her to take $25,000 out of her inheritance to buy him a vintage car. In college, she meets Robert (the two are played by Ajiona Alexus, who plays the younger version of Henson on “Empire,” and Antonio Madison), and he seems the perfect handsome selfless dude. What makes it genuinely befuddling is that for a while, at least, it seems as if Melinda is telling the straight-up truth. He has made a ludicrously scattershot drama in which overwrought feminine rage, diary-of-a-mad-woman craziness, and inept filmmaking are all but inseparable. But the trouble with this love-story-from-hell thriller - and the reason it may leave even Perry’s fans scratching their heads - is that Perry, in “Acrimony,” is a grabby but unreliable filmmaker.
As the film goes on, Melinda is revealed to be a deeply unreliable narrator.
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With every hoarse breath, she tells us: The bastard had it coming.īut everything that happens in “Acrimony” seems off-kilter, because the story the movie presents doesn’t track with the lurid nightmare of gaslighting that Melinda is telling us. No wonder she felt like she had to get even. Henson telling us things on the soundtrack) is a narrative of absolute betrayal: the con man named Robert who seduced Melinda with his lies and his soft-spoken manner, and who took all her money, and kept lying and stealing and betraying. What we hear on the soundtrack (and a lot of this movie - too much of it - is Taraji P. We then see her in a therapist’s office, brooding and chain-smoking as she looks back on the relationship that ruined her life. The movie opens in a courtroom, where Melinda, in purple lipstick, scowling like a kabuki puppet, is chastised by the judge for failing to obey a restraining order.
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Henson in her mode of trademark wrath, gazes out from the screen with an anger so coldly consuming it turns her skin to ash.
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