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Woman, Thou Art Loosed Our rating: Your rating:   MPAA rating: R (for violence, sexual content and drug use) Theater release: October 01, 2004 by Magnolia Pictures Directed by: Michael Schultz Runtime: 1 hour 35 minutes Cast: Kimberly Elise (Michelle Jordan), Loretta Devine (Cassie), Debbi Morgan (Twana), Michael Boatman (Todd), Clifton Powell (Reggie), Bishop T.D. Jakes (Himself) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Throughout his ministry, Bishop T. D. Jakes has shown a remarkable ability to minister to hurting people, especially women. His bestselling book, Woman, Thou Art Loosed: Healing the Wounds of the Past (Treasure House, 1994), became a workbook, a conference theme, a worship CD, and a stage play. Now it's a movie.

With a screenplay by Stan Foster, the film has already won awards at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and the American Black Film Festival. It has also earned an R rating for graphic depictions of sexual abuse.

As Woman opens, a hardened Michelle Jordan (Kimberly Elise) is walking up the aisle at a church revival in response to an altar call by Jakes (who plays himself). Just as we believe we are about to see a dramatic conversion experience, Michelle leans over, pulls a gun from her bag, and fires.

Having started with the climax, the film moves alternately backward and forward to trace dual narratives: the story of why Michelle did what she did, and the story of her potential transformation.

As Jakes visits her on death row, she explains how she became the hardened, cynical woman who awaits her death. "Little girls like me never grow up—they just die," she says dryly. Michelle explains that she grew up in a fatherless home, and that Reggie (Clifton Powell), her mother's live-in boyfriend, sexually abused her. Torn between her desire for her mother's love and her need to escape her painful home situation, Michelle turned to drugs and prostitution, eventually serving time for narcotics possession. The incident at the church takes place during her parole and lands her on death row.

At first, the central characters of the story—a sexually abused child who becomes a criminal; an emotionally needy, dismissive single mother; and a manipulative abuser—feel painfully commonplace, the story of countless young women. Yet Woman pushes the viewer to understand each character's motivations, most successfully those of angry, wounded Michelle and her mother Cassie (Loretta Devine). The film sympathetically portrays Cassie's fear of being alone and explains that she believes she has settled for the best relationship she can find. Without excusing her neglect of Michelle, it demonstrates, subtly and otherwise, that Cassie also struggles with unresolved abuse. Choosing blindness and self-preservation, she perpetuates the cycle.

Though attempts to flesh out the abuser and the drug dealer are admirable, they are less successful because they lack subtlety. Too often they turn toward the camera to address the audience—a technique sometimes effective on the stage, but jarring and artificial on the big screen (the film depends too heavily on this device for exposition, as well).

More subtle characterization comes through other characters' actions: a powerful shot of Cassie's hand gripping, then releasing, a butcher knife to stab Reggie when she suspects Michelle is telling the truth, or Michelle's careful cradling of the gun a friend unexpectedly provides for protection from their pimp.

Woman's most compelling performance comes from Jordan Moseley, who plays the young Michelle. At first, Michelle radiates vulnerability, innocence, and joy, but the viewer can immediately sense her instinctive suspicion toward "Uncle" Reggie. Moseley effectively conveys the rising panic in the preteen's futile attempt to evade Reggie. The stunned disbelief on her face when she tells her mother, in a child's limited vocabulary, that Reggie "hurt me"—and her mother doesn't believe her—is easily the most powerful moment.

Having filled in the narrative, the film moves back to the climactic scene at the revival and struggles for redemption. Despite the too-rapid transformation in both Reggie and the prisoner Michelle, Woman presents a powerful question: For a victim of crime or abuse, is grace worth having if it is also given freely to the offender?

Michelle comes to understand that she needs God's grace and forgiveness. But her emotions are too raw and her pain too deep to accept these gifts if her abuser can receive them too.

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Related Elsewhere:

Jakes on the Loose	Printer view
Bishop T. D. Jakes, whose best-selling book, Woman, Thou Art Loosed! is now a full-length motion picture opening this week, talked to us about the movie and its potential impact.