'Thou Art Loosed' keeps it real by simply addressing a serious topic
Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but black women don't see a lot of reality in entertainment anymore. Halle Berry climbing walls in a leather cat suit or rising from the sea in a tangerine bikini might be inspirational, but it's not real. Queen Latifah is a real woman stuck in a Hollywood domestic fantasy. Beyonce is just really, really . . . talented. And then there's Oprah Winfrey, who's the Midas of real, giving homeliness and woe 14-karat makeovers.
So when a movie like "Woman Thou Art Loosed" starts making its way across America, there might be a reason to exhale. The movie is a Christian self-help sermon masquerading as a mother-daughter melodrama. While the story couldn't be simpler and the filmmaking is crude, it forcefully addresses a reality more pressing than driving Jimmy Fallon around Manhattan. We're talking about sexual abuse, drug abuse, domestic abuse, and church.
Michelle (Kimberly Elise) lugs around psychological scars that come from being molested as a girl by her mother's boyfriend, Reggie (Clifton Powell). Eager to hold on to this alcoholic deadbeat, her mother, Cassie (Loretta Devine), takes his word that he never touched Michelle. Unmoored by this betrayal, Michelle trades her scholastic promise for life as a stripper, prison inmate, and crack whore. She's released from the pen, hardened and jaded, only to find herself on death row for walking into a church service and shooting Reggie dead.
It's a hot-blooded killing, and as directed by Michael Schultz, who lately has been working a gentler TV circuit, this is a hot-blooded movie. It has the bathos of a soap opera and the into-the-camera testimonials of an infomercial, but the single-minded, vengeful strength of a classic women's picture.
It's also a true slice of working-middle-class life in black America, something Hollywood can't seem to put on screen without severely distorting the proportions. As heavy as its hand can be, the movie gets the community dynamics right.
"Woman Thou Art Loosed," which opens locally today, has become a low-budget box-office phenomenon of the sort that suggests its core audience of God-fearing black dames is being critically underserved. They're not the only ones. The actors in the movie -- namely Elise, Devine, and the redoubtable Debbi Morgan as Twana, the flamboyant family friend -- don't work nearly enough. You can see in Elise's intense performance the same kind of ferocity from under-employment that made you watch Angela Bassett the way you'd gaze at Mount St. Helens: with nervous fascination.
"Woman Thou Art Loosed" is part of the Bishop T.D. Jakes empire. Jakes is the minister, playwright, and author, both of the recently published "He-Motions" and the book upon which "Woman Thou Art Loosed" is based. His mission as an entrepreneurial spiritual healer is to get people to act purely. The movie spends a lot of its time at Jakes's packed, arena-size revivals, where he can be seen taking his gentle, deliberate sermonizing to a growling gospel wail.
The bishop even drops by Michelle's cell to offer her counsel and advise her to go through with a new trial that might free her from death row. Obviously, this is self-promotional. But the movie is interesting in the way it offers faith as a balm and not a crutch.
"Woman Thou Art Loosed" ends with a plea for abused women to visit its website for help. So ultimately it is more a public service announcement than a movie, but it has to be more useful to its audience than a summer blockbuster offering Halle Berry's tips on how to use a bullwhip.
Wesley Morris can reached at wmorris@globe.com.
Woman Thou Art Loosed
**1/2
