BATTERED: a movie review

 

BATTERED: a movie review

After its most violent and gut-wrenching opening scene, Battered, Halle Berry's Netflix-starring, directorial debut, settles into the mundanity of its title characters subsistence.

Living a haunted, ghost's shell of a life, Jackie Justice, a former UFC prospect, reacts violently to the creepy intrusion of a voyeuristic, Succession-level rich kid, who apparently has a thing about covertly filming her as she changes from her maid's uniform into her own clothing.

This repeated intrusion triggers a violent exchange, leading on to a series of catastrophic events which culminates in the unexpected arrival of her long estranged child, a traumatized 6-year old, mute with shock after watching his father, an undercover police officer, get violently murdered.

That's a lot to process, right? Well, this is just the start of a long and often painful ride that lasts through two hours of bruises, blood, cruelty and, somewhere along the way, a little bit of redemption.

Battered, for all of its visceral brutality, tells its story through an adept application of emotional nuance, painting a picture with its pain, crafting a masterwork with the blood, the bruises and the trauma.

For Jackie Justice, Halle's character, this pain overwhelms with a sense of helplessness, an angry reaction to an unwanted intrusion in light of having to submit to menial subservience.

But, inherently, she feels also that she is deserving of this pain, that she is not, in effect, being victimized, but punished.

This bitter truth is driven home when she is googled and cruelly harrassed, laughed at to her face for her moment of most public humiliation.

This quick-filmed culture does that, erases the identity of public figures. Reducing a celebrity, even a washed-up, one-time UFC fighter, to no more than a meme. A joke, who's worth has been quantified only for public consumption.

Her response here, in answer to a voyeuristic intrusion of a different sort, by two young men in front of a corner store, is resignation. Her anger had been spent.

This plays out in the tortuous sex scene with her manager/boyfriend, who's own anger over the lost job and the attendant required restitution, paid for by hocking his golden gloves pendant, erupts into a brief, violent sexual encounter that comes across as more punishment than pleasure.

His fury, though, isn't centered on the firing, it is rooted in his regret; for sticking with Jackie after the disastrous events foretold in the opening act, and, as is later revealed, perhaps for his mismanagement and heartless and dangerous decision-making in pushing her towards that public meltdown.

For Jackie, the sex is no where near cathartic. There is no comfort or release, none sought. She remained passive, in opposition to the flared aggression she showed earlier towards the weird kid with the power fantasy. She gave herself over to her boyfriend's brutality, again as if the pain and humiliation were deserving, that she was no less than worthy of the punishment.

Halle Berry handles these shifting emotions with an adept hand. The viewing audience has long been conditioned to consider her sex appeal, without remembering that one of her first on-screen appearances was as an unrecognizable crackhead in a low budget Spike Lee flick.

Here, though, just as she had done in that movie, Jungle Fever, she rejects the depth-less, sexualized characterization in lieu of a gritty, bruised and battered performance that requires the viewer to dismiss any such shallow assumptions.

Battered should also be commended for its development of the supporting cast, although Sheila Atim's character, Buddakhan's emotional spiral back into her addiction felt, in the moment, too easy. Maybe displaying just a tad bit of narrative laziness.

And shout outs to Newark, NJ, a character in its own right, which serves as a big part of that narrative construct. All of Battered's resident cast, like the city itself, were hard-nosed. Gritty. Tough-minded. They were people determined to survive and thrive despite the odds stacked against them.

Above all, Jackie's 'Ma' was perfect. Who is she? She reminds me of 'Shug Avery', from the Color Purple.

You know, “You sho' is ugly--!”

Whoever she is, she brought to life a character recognizable in every hood in America and played her with conviction, not as a caricature, but a real person, unapologetically displaying her warts and worn-spots and the outright horrific, for all to see.

Her inclusion also opened the door to some very uncomfortable conversations. Perhaps even as a way to shed light on the unfortunate penchant for ignoring or justifying the ugliness that creeps into the lives of the vulnerable when we let down our guard.

Sexual assault and molestation affects countless numbers of Children of Color, and yet, we tend to treat it like a skinned knee or a tweaked ankle; you know, 'Walk it off--”

When faced with the reality of the effects of such trauma, our response is often to blame the victim or to simply deny the truth.

It is a tribute to the work that Battered handles these difficult conversations with, not sensitivity, but a straightforward, unflinching manner that adds to the main character's mythology without diminishing the impact.

Our stories, our experiences, are more often minimized and deemed trivial in terms of their literary importance, treated with the same snide disdain as the idea of a fine dining Soul Food or Mexican restaurant.

This is a conditioned perspective. With the onset of streaming, however, we now have the opportunity to further demand that these tropes be relegated to history's trash bin, where they belong.

So, message to Netflix, more movies like Battered, please?

Gonna check out Passing, with Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, next--