Acrimony: A Review

Be warned, there are spoilers!

The movie starts with a powerful song by Nina Simone that draws you into the first scene. The protagonist and the antagonist of the movie in a court setting with specific focus on the angry and hateful look on the face of the protagonist. Two minutes into the movie, she’s sentenced to attend anger management sessions with Nina Simone’s soulful voice in the background. If you’ve ever been in a relationship, you’ll know it takes no effort to go from love to hate. From happiness to anger and suddenly the person that brought butterflies to your stomach becomes the object of your anger, so the movie goes.

Our protagonist is now in an anger management class and so begins the narration of the movie and how it all unfolded. A story of an innocent young girl and how she met a guy. They fall in love, one things leads to another, everything is perfect (like it always tends to be at the beginning) then they get to the middle of the relationship. You know that part? When things settle into a routine, you begin to notice the person’s fault and all that stuff. So they’re right there in the middle and they start to notice each other’s flaws. One thing about this movie is how polarising it has been. Opinions and reactions tend to be divided across gender lines, so I’ll try to keep mine balanced.

A simple search on twitter will show you all the available reactions to the movie. Two of the most interesting analysis I’ve seen conclude with two things:

1. The guy didn’t fight hard enough. 
2. He shouldn’t have moved on with his life and fought for his marriage even though she’d divorced him.

My question to this then is this: who determines what is hard enough before it becomes stalker behaviour or some other term if this had actually happened in real life? Should you really wait for someone that’s ended their relationship with you and done their best to show you that they no longer want you and would rather tear you down when you try? At what point do you say ok, let me think about me and pick up the broken pieces? So here are my thoughts:

• They built their marriage on a poor foundation. How do I know this? Not one mention was made about their spiritual life or having God as the focus of their relationship before marriage and in marriage, they were never seen praying or even at the least, going to church. Matt. 7:24-27, Jesus gave a parable of a house that was built on a rock and another that was built on sand. Of course, their marriage crashed because it was built on sand. One of the most important things in any relationship is the foundation. Food for thought: Ps. 11:3.

• They lacked counselling. Proverbs is one of my favourite books in the bible and three times(that I know of), it mentions the importance of counsel: Prov. 11:14, 15:22, 24:6. Now you may say Mel got counsel from her sisters but I’ll say to you, never take decisions based on counsel from someone who hasn’t heard from the two people involved and put in the effort to bring you both into one place to discuss whatever the issue is (I’m guilty of this mistake). No matter who they are to you. Family member, best friend, youth pastor, whoever. 

• Offences were never discussed in-depth or attempts made to work at forgiving and forgetting. One constant theme, you’d hear while watching the movie are all the things she did for him and all the ways he hurt her. As human beings, it is very easy for us to get offended and to be honest, there’s nothing wrong in getting offended but what is wrong and dangerous, is to allow that offence take root in your heart, germinate and begin to bear fruits. Before long, those tiny offences build big fences around your heart and close out the person you love. The scary part? The person may not even know until the fences have been built solid and you take the decision to close them out. Study Eph. 4:26-27 and listen to the link I’ll share below. Practice forgiveness every moment of every day. 

• Wisdom and understanding was not consistently applied. The movie is littered with too many situations in which this was the case. Wisdom is the principal thing, then understanding (Prov. 4:7). Study: Prov. 3 :19, 24 :3.

Before you proceed to break a relationship or marriage for that matter, sit down and think. Is it the person or is it the situation? More often than not, it’s the situations and if you can get your partner to sit down in one place, have a heart to heart frequently and also have regular prayer sessions together, strictly for your relationship.
The devil will always fight relationships. It’s never about our differences but about what we choose to focus on and the moment we choose to focus on the negatives or the offences, the devil begins his victory dance. Your focus determines your perspective.

The charge for the week
The charge as we go into the week is to examine our relationships/marriage and try to apply the four steps above among others.

Sage

P.S. Please listen to what’s hurting your relationship by Steven Furtick:
https://youtu.be/q5vffxSQibk

Also listen to this podcast titled Stay Focused:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/elevation-with-steven-furtick/id216015753?mt=2&i=1000415081048 

P.P.S. One of my mainest guys got married over the weekend. I wish you a happy married life bro. 

Photo credit: Acrimony Movie twitter handle @AcrimonyMovie