Acrimony
“If there’s one thing you can count on in a Tyler Perry film, it’s that a woman’s husband will run around on her with another man.”
Title: Acrimony (2018)
Director: Tyler Perry 👨🏿🇺🇸
Writer: Tyler Perry 👨🏿🇺🇸
Reviewed by John Manuel Arias 👨🏽🇺🇸🇨🇷🌈♿
Note: This review was commissioned by Lionsgate. The content and methodology remain 100% independent and in line with Mediaversity's non-commissioned reviews.
Technical: 2/5
Tyler Perry has done it again, and not in a good way. This 2018 drama-turned-thriller is just another in a long succession of Perry thinking he has hit a home run, when in fact, he has swung and missed. While Perry knows how to draw in an audience and sell tickets, there are still plenty who pray each movie will be his final inning.
On paper, Acrimony sounds great: An empathetic protagonist is scorned by her husband and slowly driven into madness, and ultimately, revenge, in a Frankenstein-like composite of Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005) and Fatal Attraction (1987). But Perry’s reliance on melodrama, a stilted script, and the irredeemable waste of Taraji P. Henson’s talent has only managed to make me acrimonious.
Apparently Perry shot Acrimony in eight days, which doesn’t surprise. The movie has a solid plot—girl meets boy, boy manipulates girl out of money, girl divorces boy, but then he makes it big. However, Perry doesn’t seem confident in his own ability to tell the story. He defaults to the voice of our protagonist and unreliable narrator, Melinda (Henson). She summarizes her life with cynicism and rancor, muffling the themes of the movie which ask: How do we make excuses for those we love? What happens when those we love gaslight us? And how far can punishment go when we are hurt?
The movie could have answered all of these organically, even poignantly. But Perry’s insistence on having Melinda narrate interrupts its own explorations. Acrimony fails because Perry tries to tell two interwoven stories which fight rather than complement each other.
Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE
Melinda may be the film’s unequivocal protagonist, but she goes through the wringer of tropes for the sake of the plot. From a woman who sacrifices everything for a man to a vengeful murderer, the plot exaggerates every incarnation of a woman into stereotype. Throughout the film, Perry paints Melinda as the “Strong Black Woman.” She financially supports a husband who is perceived as lazy, and she does so out of pure love, because to Perry there is no other explanation.
When that trope is used for all its worth, Perry transforms Melinda into the “Angry Black Woman” overcome with rage. From inexplicable bouts of violence as a teen, to a cartoonish yacht massacre, Perry convinces the audience Melinda’s frustration is innate, therefore her fault. According to the movie, she works because she must, but she kills because she was born to.
And when the writing needs to establish why Melinda is capable of such innate violence, we’re introduced to yet another problematic take. Melinda’s court-ordered therapist (Denise Woods) coyly mentions to her the idea of Borderline Personality Disorder—a loaded diagnosis with a history of gender bias—and Melinda’s reaction, which is to dash from the office, suggests her therapist has struck a nerve. But without further exploration, this superficial grab for “mental illness” as a gendered factor for Melinda’s rage merely exemplifies another chance Perry had to subvert stereotypes. Instead, he puts them front and center.
Race: 3.5/5
With 18 films and a career that has spanned almost 2 decades, Perry has cemented himself as one of the most accomplished directors of all time. Like his contemporaries Lee Daniels and Spike Lee, Perry is concerned with telling Black stories, and he does so by featuring casts of primarily Black actors whose careers are launched into stardom.
Unfortunately, despite his power and prestige in Hollywood, he has regularly excluded other Black creatives in the process. He has bragged that he is, and will always be, the only person in the writers room, for example. With such a huge platform, Perry could propel the careers of other Black creatives but he defends this as his work ethic
In this vacuum of ideas, the work suffers, with Acrimony a case in point. Perry leans into some of his more troubling portrayals of Black characters, especially women and/or queer representation: Black women as the receptacle of trauma; the colorist implication that dark-skinned men cause more harm to Black women; and the homophobic idea that gay Black men are unethical and similarly threaten to Black women. All these caricatures in Acrimony diminish the range of Black humanity.
Deduction for LGBTQ: -1.00
Perry is infamous in his treatment of LGBTQ people, especially gay Black men. They are only shown as closeted, and therefore vessels of betrayal. If there’s one thing you can count on in a Tyler Perry film, it’s that a woman’s husband will run around on her with another man.
In Acrimony, Melinda very surgically and cruelly insinuates that her brother-in-law is cheating on her sister with men. She gloats, saying that everyone knows about it, and uses her words as weapons in a way that feels carelessly written. Despite such loaded language, Perry never examines homophobia or the detrimental situations that force Black men to be closeted in the first place. Instead, Melinda’s brother-in-law is portrayed as just another man cheating on his woman, in a way that inspires deep shame and embarrassment for all parties involved.
Mediaversity Grade: D 2.50/5
With more time—and more behind-the-camera talent that included women—Perry could have added some much-needed complexity to Melinda’s character. Instead, Perry reduces her to harmful stereotypes. Perry could have also properly introduced a queer character, but again casually drops a homophobic aside and then leaves it at that.
Acrimony’s treatment of diversity of the Black experience fails precisely because Perry produces his projects alone. As long as he remains the sole creative, his movies will always reflect his own lived experiences, and therefore the pattern of both exclusion—and the reductive portrayals of his characters—will persist. Not until Tyler Perry opens the door to more writers, will his movies do a better job of getting it right.