I know it’s late but . . . Acrimony

Spoiler Warning.

If you haven’t seen the movie and you’re the type that hates spoilers, just stop here right now. People didn’t give me that decency.

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Still here?

Okay so the movie came out and the blame game was at large. Who’s really at fault? The man or the woman? I tried to ignore it till when I finally got the time to watch the movie.

So I finally watched the movie last week Friday. The story is a complex one and I love good storywriting. You know a good story when people care about your characters, including being engrossed enough to argue about them. I wouldn’t have given the movie a high rating but at least it got people talking.

So who do I think is at fault?

Like I said, the story is complex. You don’t just jump on a side without considering both sides fully. For a while now I’ve tried to live my life in a way where I hear both sides of the story before I conclude. I haven’t been perfect at it, but I’ve been trying. It even gets to the point that when any my friends may hurt me, I still find ways to blame myself and try to learn from it because whether you like it or not, relationships go both ways. Even through they may be wrong, they might have been reacting to something I did. That doesn’t excuse them, but it doesn’t excuse me either.

Everything the woman did was as a reaction to what the man did. That doesn’t excuse her in any way at all. But do we just erase everything he did? He cheated on her. He essentially made her invest her inheritance in him. Did I say he cheated on her? For eighteen good(bad) years, she slaved to pay the bills and put food on the table. Eighteen years is a long time to harvest bitterness. Bitterness stemming from having an irresponsible husband. How would you feel comfortable working on your “dreams” when your wife is working different jobs to keep both of you afloat? Your dreams aren’t making you any money. When would you grow up? You have a woman who loves you enough to forgive you for cheating on her. She spent her inheritance on you. This is how you pay her back? Do you even appreciate her at all?

For half of the movie these were the thoughts that could’ve gone through anyone’s head. He definitely looked like the con man he was being painted to be.

So now, back to the woman. From the moment we meet her in the beginning of the story, I knew she had issues. Why? You bump into someone in the rain. Your assignments fall down and are being drenched. What do you do? You beat him and run away. Hello? Anyone up there?

Eventually, she forgives him and they start to get close. Her mother dies and she inherits a house and a some money. She believes in his dream and stupidly (according to her) starts investing said money into him by buying him a car. Whether it’s stupid or not is debatable. Truth be told, if you believe in the dreams of someone you love, you wont hesitate to sacrifice for them. Unfortunately, a lot of men in this life are scum. So the question is not about whether a lady should invest in a guy. The real question is whether he’s worth it.

He cheats on her. Being cheated on is not a good place to be in at all. Like she said at the beginning of the movie, she had a right to be angry. She really did. She had a right to the pain, the hurt, the swirling of emotions in her at that particular moment. But then, what does she do? She drives her car right into his trailer. Not once, not twice but repeatedly till it topples over, then she destroys the car she bought for him.

Question. What if they died? The guy and the girl he was sleeping with. What if they were killed? The court would not hear the fact that she was heartbroken. You don’t justify driving yourself into a trailer. She could’ve died too. As a matter of fact, she’s deeply affected by it because the accident made her unable to give birth to children for life.

Look. I’ve seen anger. I’ve seen what it does to people. You can be deeply offended but everything you do from that point on is your decision and therefore, your fault. Who suffered at the end of the day for her inability to bear children? Yes, the guy was the catalyst but she let herself spiral out of control.

I stopped to see myself in her situation. Who has hurt me and am I using him or her as an excuse to throw tantrums? If I am, I need to grow up because bad things happen and you are inevitably going to be hurt in this life. The least you could do is learn to not destroy yourself in the process.

Maybe I’m being insensitive. Maybe a girl can better understand the mind of a heartbroken woman. But what we have on the table is this; the girl was heartbroken but she could heal. Her ovaries could not.

Somehow she forgives him, though. At this point of the movie we’re already seeing her as the incredibly naive girl. She even pays the rest of his tuition. But “love” makes you do stupid things, especially when you’re young. They get married and she does most of the work to keep them afloat. Somewhere along the line, he messes up big time and nearly costs her sisters and their husbands their business, just because they wanted to give him a chance (but mostly to help save the house) and he blew it.

I wouldn’t have given him such a big opportunity, anyway. Why give him a truck to make important deliveries. Why not make him a clerk or a secretary or something? But hey, I digress.

He blew it because he saw a huge opportunity that he’d been waiting for for eighteen years. He couldn’t pass it up. This was the deal of a lifetime, right? If he got the deal, all their problems would’ve gone away anyway.

They wanted to buy off his idea for eight hundred thousand dollars. Big break right? That’s more than two times what she had spent on him. The house would’ve been saved and everyone could be relatively happy. What does he do? He doesn’t take the deal and he has the liver to go back home and tell them this. As if that wasn’t the only problem, the same girl who had cheated on him had resurfaced in his life and now he had allegedly cheated on his wife again.

We know, as the audience that this isn’t true but you can’t actually blame his wife for the next thing that happens.

Long story cut short, she couldn’t take it anymore. This was the last straw. She kicked him out of the house and with the help of her sisters and tried to move on with her life.

If only the story ended there.

The story is two sided. At one point, it seems the guy is the villain. But as the story unfolds, the story seems to tilt in favour of her being the villain.

The guy lives on the streets but eventually, he makes his big break! How? The investor reconsidered and gave him a deal that made him worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This was it. He’d finally made it! And in a turn of events that made me start to realise that maybe he actually loved her, he gave her 10 million dollars and bought back her house. From a financial standpoint, he had paid her back at least three times over. But that wasn’t his goal. It was his way of saying thank you. He couldn’t have her but he could bless her, right?

Turned out her moving on did not go so well. This new guy could not satisfy her and she had regretted divorcing her husband, especially due to the fact that she was under the influence of her sisters.

So she goes to his new house and apologises. She then tries to sleep with him, probably as a peace treaty. I really don’t know what was going on in her head at that point.

That made me cringe because I’ve always hated the idea of a lady being all over a man because of his success. What did you do when he was nothing?

So now the question is did she come back to him because she loved him? How do you justify that? Was she just coming back to collect what was hers? Because why did a penthouse and a large amount of money suddenly make her remember she loved him?

Unfortunately for her, she finds out he’s already in a relationship with none other than the person he cheated on her with. What an insult! This spawns a whole series of events that comprise of her cyber bullying his new fiancé, ruining the wedding dress, stalking, ogling over everything this guy bought for this woman that should’ve been hers (he promised me!), court cases, a montage of her running mad and losing her mind and eventually her sneaking into their boat, forcing the entire crew to jump overboard (they had no life jackets on), shooting him, trying to kill the other woman, hitting him with an axe, and eventually dying by mistake when the anchor of the boat forces her down into the ocean and ultimately drowns her.

I probably broke so many laws of English by cramming all of that into one sentence.

Let’s pause. What did she do? One of the things that I noticed was when she sued him for more money, she could’ve actually had a chance in that case if she hadn’t been insulting and threatening the other woman online. She was her own wrecking ball and everyone around her, including her was collateral damage. One of her friends even made a joke about this.

And did anyone notice that throughout the entire story, no one seemed to love her enough to notice that she obviously had a problem and make her get help? Not her ex-husband, not her sisters, not her friend and not her brothers in law.

They all swept it under things like her being crazy when she’s mad. She would cool down. It was even the source of a joke.

So let me ask again. Who’s at fault?

Pretty much the entire main cast of the movie. You’re all missing the point in my opinion. This woman had bipolar disorder. She needed help. No one could see that and that mirrors our society today. We all jumped on the wagon of male vs. female and no one bothered to notice the cause of a lot of tragedy in the end even after she died.

We all focus on the smaller details and don’t notice the huge ones. People are seriously hurting. People have things they’re dealing with. People have self destructive problems that require someone willing to repeatedly tell the truth to help them take note and so something about their internal ticking time bombs.

Imagine the story if someone noticed that she needed help after crashing herself into his trailer. She may have been able to make something out of her life with the settlement he gave her. Ten million dollars is a lot of money for a debt free person. She may have even stood a chance of winning her case against him if she had a good lawyer. Maybe she would’ve won the money. Either way she still had years ahead of her and enough money. She could’ve actually moved on and lived a good life.

But no, she died a horrible death.

Fact of the matter is, if someone you claim to be your family member or friend wrecks, someone you see often and claim to be close to . . .

Then you share part of the blame.