Synopsis
Unsuccessfully trying to close old family wounds on a trip back to the Rhode Island home of her miserable childhood, a troubled young woman finds her new friendship with a neighbor has her stuck in another family drama.
Vengeance Is Mine
Cast
Director
Producer
Writer
Editor
Cinematography
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Releases by Date
Theatrical
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USA
08 Mar 2023
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France
Releases by Country
France
08 Mar 2023
- Theatrical
USA
19 Mar 1984
- Theatrical
Popular reviews
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Twice, hair-cutting is used as a form of abuse. Both times it is very harrowing, but the blade never punctures the skin. That's the fine line Roemer walks throughout this melodrama. It is sleepy and mundane but with every burst of drama, it thwarts expectations (reminds me of something Mike Leigh said at a Q&A the other day, that he doesn't make genre films; he makes emotional ones). Upon learning that this film used to be called "Haunted," I remembered Jackie asking Jo if she is afraid of ghosts, as one lives in the bedroom she would occupy. I see now that she meant her mother, Donna.
35mm.
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A story that unfolds in the two hours between two sustained, unsettling close-ups, both of Brooke Adams as her character, Jo, is flying as far as possible from where her life is taking place in that moment. If one measure of a good movie is that you can't possibly predict where it's going to go next, Vengeance is Mine scrambles our scene-to-scene expectations about as thoroughly as any "straight" drama of the period I can remember; the scenes and exchanges move at the speed of the characters' impulses, ]and yet it's not like the tone is artificially pumped-up or over the top, or italicized satirically to take the edge off. Instead, working with a television budget and a modest ensemble…
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we arrive with nothing, no bags to claim. we leave piles of dirty laundry in a chair, making promises, before washing, before folding. the piles reappear, then disappear, like a magic trick. we break our favorite mug but nobody else cares. we glue the pieces together and what used to be smooth is now bumpy and a reminder of our foolish, careless nature. we find ways to escape, to inhabit other haunted places, to drop ourselves. we try to repair someone else’s mug but they tell us not to worry about it. we pretend we’re not the type of people to leave a mess. we become the bump. we try to smooth things over. we depart and check our bags, leaving with more than we brought. we throw the bags in the chair, afraid and unprepared to unzip; to unpack.
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Like a nagging wound refusing to heal, causing infections that in turn create new ones. A tiring search for the oft-mentioned even keel—people say it’s out there, some go so far as to claim it is reachable—leading you here, there… eventually back home, the inception point, where the first stresses were stridently applied that configured the cracks in the precarious foundation of your life. We can’t fill in these cracks with love, drink, surrogacy; we cannot heal ourselves by healing others, no matter how much we may think that by saving them we can save ourselves too; and it is so hard to consider yourself when you see another in pain, especially when you know that pain so well, but sometimes you just can’t save anyone but you. The hope and pain pervade in spades and you wear it all there on your face.
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Interviewing Brooke Adams after the screening was an indescribable joy. She was clearly nervous, said she didn’t have a good memory, and not used to the deserved spotlight. Beyond analysis and the quality of the film (which oozes beyond every tight, tripwire frame), it brings me such overwhelming happiness to see the creators of works they didn’t think would last beyond one broadcast night see that they’ve touched countless unimaginable others. It’s not much. But it’s what we have to work with.
Brooke paints now; she was at a painter’s retreat when a friend told her about the New York Times review. I take it she’s one of these unassuming termite artists, unbothered by frivolities, invested in the big heart picture.
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"You were my faith. I was yours."
Slow-burning communal trainwreck conducted in the key of pasts' immortality, hate's faithful transference serving its purpose and infecting saintly self-insert fantasy to the point of nigh-gangrenous disrepair. Getting mixed up in what's mixed up because hurt's pull knows no bounds, and the allure of what should've been (finally) coming to fruition is everything you need here, now and forevermore as confined to a fraught, futilely distended timeline. Encounter one another, attempt to alleviate what's haunted you and move on because it's necessary, and not because everything's all better.
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Rewatched (again) on Criterion Channel. Run, don't walk ... to your living room, I guess. If you have hardwood floors, don't wear socks. Be safe.
I'm pretty cynical about new movies these days. I worry sometimes that my not enjoying new fiction films has to do with some loss of ability to experience pleasure, or to meet art on its own terms. A movie like this one, to invoke a cliche, restores one's faith in the project of human drama. It's staggering how a film this modestly scaled can continue to reveal new depths on each viewing, which may also simply be a function of how caught up I get in its emotional undertow every time. I'm very thankful to have found Vengeance is Mine, and I want as many people as possible to find it too, now that it's widely available, so I won't say anything more.
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one of the more evocative, cinematic portrayals of New England, a region of America that I've called home for the vast majority of my life, that manages to capture how simultaneously idyllic and foreboding life in a coastal, seasonally brash, environment can be and how that changes the people who inhabit it in more ways than one -- pretty much a masterclass in acting from Brooke Adams
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absolutely batshit melodrama!!! basically NOW, VOYAGER for 80s new england. it's got everything—people shrieking, being an interloper taking sides in the divorce of a couple you just met, the wildest jumpscare i've ever seen in a melodrama, the eastern orthodox church, an extremely convoluted premise and backstory (the first 30 minutes are spent setting up that she's adopted, knows her birth mother is nearby and wants to meet her, her adopted mother is ill so she's also visiting her, also she has a bad relationship with her adopted mother, she had a baby at 16 and put it up for adoption, she's getting divorced from her extremely possessive husband, she's about to relocate to start a job in seattle, she…
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Michael Roemer's shape-shifting masterpiece, lost to the opaque catacombs of 80s TV, but which, in another world, would have gotten as much praise and accolades as, say, Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies (which I watched for the first time yesterday, and to which this film sports uncanny resemblances: the dissolution of a family over adoption, dead time raised to an untapped level of musical elegance in a narrative film, etc.) Originally released as "Haunted," an episode on the third season of PBS's American Playhouse (the same season that premiered Bill Duke's The Killing Floor, which also recently came up for air), the effort to categorize Vengenace is Mine (it's Bergmanesque! it's Cassavetes! it's Altmanesque! it's a trauma caper! it's a…
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‘I love you’.
‘I know’.One of the most violent films I’ve ever seen, but not a single drop of blood is shed. Something like if Henry James wrote a haunted ghost story disguised as a psychological family drama. Most things in this film come in doubles, for sometimes history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as forgiveness. A film on how to accept the guilt of being innocent.
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