Movies into Film
Woman, Thou Art Loosed
Directed by Michael Schultz
USA, 2004
Woman, Thou Art Loosed opens with Bishop T.D. Jakes preaching to a revival meeting flock of saints and sinners. The dulcet cadence of Bishop Jakes’ voice, to my ear, can’t help but summon the style and authority of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He’s a phenomenally good speaker, and it helps that the director Michael Schultz and the cinematographer Reinhart Peschke take a panoramic approach to this scene. With a uniformed choir swaying and singing behind the bishop, and parishioners interacting with theatrical flair, the filmmakers succinctly establish the rootedness of the church in black communities.
Come Sunday: Morgan and Elise in Woman, Thou Art Loosed (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
Into this spectacle comes the slightly bedraggled, visibly angry Michelle Jordan (Kimberly Elise). Michelle looks every inch like the “backslider” whom Bishop Jakes describes from the pulpit. You can see the hate in her eyes, the wounded psyche. She approaches the altar, her manner no less disturbed with each step, and then Schultz pulls the rug out from under us in a shocking, audacious twist. I won’t give it away, but you have the rest of the opening credits to catch your breath.
Woman, Thou Art Loosed began life as a novel by Bishop Jakes, its lead character Michelle a fictional composite of the many abused, battered women he met through his Dallas-based ministry. Uneven though the movie may be, it’s also undeniably powerful. Woman, Thou Art Loosed details Michelle’s return to civilian life after serving three years of a jail term. Her mother, Cassey, dodges a reunion with her daughter at nearly every turn, and in flashbacks, we see why.
Cassey, a loud, lonely, cartoon of a woman, screams at the 8-year-old Michelle in front of a suave new “uncle,” a well-heeled con man whom she met in the unemployment line. Cassey’s meant to be crude, and Reggie (this is their first date) assesses her as an obvious mark. Alone with young Michelle, he creepily asks about her about breasts: “Do you know what it means to develop?”
When Michelle reaches age 12, Reggie sexually assaults her. Cassey discovers her daughter in the aftermath, terrified and sobbing in the bedroom closet. Instead of offering comfort, Cassey blames the victim: she tells Michelle that what happened is her own fault. The movie, however, goes beyond victimization and takes on the broader theme of tension between the generations who will either acknowledge abuse openly, as a means to heal, or those who consider silence (wrongly, I think) a mature response, a sign of “moving on” from what hasn’t been brought to light.
Elise with Michael Boatman (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)
Loretta Devine, as Cassey, plays her role too broadly. She often seems amateurish. And yet, in these scenes, that same quality is almost exactly what’s called for. Cassey is typical of the women—regardless of color—who spice up their drab existences by pitting their lovers and children against one another in a sick rivalry.
Schultz and his editor Billy Fox accomplish a dramatic coup in the film’s depiction of violence, which relies more on quick cuts, lighting effects, and sound design than explicit visuals. In a sequence where Michelle’s former pimp beats her on the porch of a halfway house, Fox crosscuts between them to shots of the sleazy club where Michelle had been more or less enslaved as a pole dancer. I didn’t know whether I was looking at flashbacks, flash-forwards, or Michelle’s own in the moment, succumbing-to-trauma scenario. But the shock works fiercely.
Among the cast, Clifton Powell strikes realistic chords as Reggie. As the childhood Michelle, Destiny Edmond attains perfection. Debbi Morgan, as a longtime family friend who operates a beauty salon, has some good moments. The use of Morgan as comic relief falls a bit flat, yet she’s something to behold at one of the revival meetings, clad in a fuchsia velvet suit with a diaphanous lavender sash tied in a big floral bow on her hat. The costume designer Rita McGhee has done a superb job all around with the Sunday-go-to-meetin’s, but with Morgan’s attire, she outdoes herself.
The movie nevertheless belongs to Kimberly Elise as the adult Michelle, a woman struggling to vent her deep anger yet somehow at the same time move past it. Impressive eye candy in Jonathan Demme’s misguided Manchurian Candidate remake, Elise here proves she can carry a film. I’m hesitant to call her performance a breakthrough, but only because I sense there’s so much more to Elise to be tapped. She makes it believable that Michelle, mere days out of prison, would accept a handgun even though she’s aware that it violates parole. “Remember the day you found out the boogeyman was more real than you thought?” she wearily challenges a lady parole officer. Elise’s intonation rings with the dread authenticity of a woman who knows.
October 16, 2004
A version of this review originally appeared at The Raw Story.
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com