Vengeance is Mine (1984), dir. by Michael Roemer. Trylon Cinema, Friday, November 18.

In media res—the practice of beginning an epic or other narrative by plunging into a crucial situation that is part of a related chain of events. -Encyclopedia Britannica

We open with a shot of a woman’s face. This is Jo (Brooke Adams), who we’ll learn was once Mary Jo, now just Jo. She’s drinking. The plane is about to land in a place that makes Jo want to drink.

Her mother is dying. Actually, it’s her adopted mother, and Jo also has a sister who is that woman’s biological daughter—so even in her family she’s an outcast. There’s also a step-dad. Mom clearly doesn’t want to have anything to do with Jo. She doesn’t want to hear that Jo has found her birth mother. She doesn’t seem to want Jo around in her last days.

Jo and her sister go to a drugstore restaurant for coffee. There, a man filthy from repairing automobiles is sitting at a table with a miserable looking family. He sees Jo, and when she goes to get some aspirin (she’s gonna need it), he runs to her and says hello. She brushes him off and when he sister asks who he is, she tells him that’s the guy who got her pregnant years ago. ““No,” she says. “He’s the guy I got to get me pregnant.”

I think this is Dover, New York, a little run-down hamlet that was watching its manufacturing base die, just as Jo is watching her distant mother die. Soon, she’s going to be accosted by a mean fuck of a man, a wealthy lawyer who, it turns out, she’s married to and about to get divorced. He begs her to stay with him, begs her to eat with him when that fails, then begs her to sleep with him when lunch fails, and then, in a shocking scene, he assaults her. Recovering at her sister’s house, Jo finds herself on the porch, unable to cope with her sister’s happy young family (Jo gave up a baby and doesn’t need to watch her sister breastfeed the child she got to keep). As she stares off into the darkness, she runs into the teenage girl next door, who swings in on an inexplicable zipline that’s connected to two trees. She says hello, they talk, and it turns out the girl’s parents are divorcing, and would Jo like to come over and hang out? Because the girl’s mother is missing and she’s worried. Jo agrees. And that’s when her trouble really begins.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to make of this little film, except that I knew it was by Michael Roemer, an amazing director of smaller, very independent movies whose work keeps getting rediscovered every 10-20 years. In the late 80s it was Nothing But a Man and in the 1990s it was The Plot Against Harry, two absolutely brilliant movies that looked roughly made but were totally surprising—if you think about it, it’s actually pretty rare to be genuinely surprised by a turn of events in a film. Even great films often go by without leaving me surprised. But Vengeance is Mine is my favorite of Roemer’s movies, it left me exhilarated and tense—and I have to say that I haven’t been this tense during a movie in many moons.

Thing is, Jo is a character who doesn’t seem to want resolutions or answers. She is emotional and needy, like all of us, and tries her best to make the most of bad situations. But she also, in the words of Sarah Polley, runs towards the danger, though pretty much only when it comes to women (the men in the film aggressively bring danger to her). Like many people, she’s caught up in horrible circumstances, many of which are her own making, some of which are from her reaction to evils thrust upon her, some of which are just simply the bad things happen to all of us. We don’t see many of these troubles developed, nor explained, we enter in media res, right in the center of the devastation. Do we need a ton of backstory? No—we don’t need to know the circumstances of what makes Jo and her mom so distant, or how she rebelled against her very religious upbringing (I’ve never seen anyone look so isolated in a church as Brooke Adams does here), or how she got that guy to get her pregnant. We’ll get a bit of backstory, when characters feel pushed into a corner and need to explain their very strange behavior, but for the most part we see character develop in their present actions. And the present is a very messy place.

So Jo ends up hanging out at the neighbor’s house, home of the teenage girl, Jackie (Ari Meyers), who is a bundle of nervous energy herself—her parents are divorcing, she’s going to Pittsburgh to live with her journalist dad, Tom (Jon DeVries), and she can’t find her mother, Donna (Trish Van Devere). We’re not really privy to the fact that her mom is fraught with mental illness, at first it just seems like both parents are out-and-about. People left their 13-year-olds alone all the time in 1980s. But it’s true—Donna, the mother, has gone off the deep end. In the course of the remaining hour and twenty minutes, Donna is going to peel layer after layer of this crazy onion until everyone’s eyes burn. Worse, no one around can turn away, no one around her can flee.

Vengeance is Mine was made in 1984, but no distributor would touch it. It ended up on PBS’ American Playhouse, where it might have been shown on TV in Michigan when I was a teen. Would that I had caught it then, and been tormented as I was the other night. Sometimes, it’s better to get thrown to the wolves when you’re a teen and your emotions are already close to worn from the madness of your teenage years. Had this movie gotten any kind of release, Trish Van Devere, who had some Hollywood gravitas (she was married to George C. Scott and appeared in many of his films), would have been nominated for every Supporting Actress Award on the planet. As Wesley Morris puts it in his glowing New York Times review: “Van Devere was married, for years, to George C. Scott, when Scott was soaring at his histrionic apogee. She knows from all-consuming performance. Because, here she is, consumed.” I mean, son of a bitch, the lady is consumed. This belongs up their with every great celluloid madness brought to us by Blanchett, Day-Lewis, De Niro, except, perhaps, that it looks less mannered and more like she asked them to roll the cameras as she was on her way to a legitimate breakdown.

And it’s one of the best breakdowns, or pair of breakdowns (Jo isn’t faring much better), I’ve ever seen in a film. Even in great movies like Cassavetes’ Woman Under the Influence has an epic-independent cinema feel to it. Donna’s collapse is dangerous—to herself and to her child. It easily eclipses whatever minor madnesses have preceded it in the course of the movie, and when it breaks, it’s stunning.

But everyone’s amazing in this shocking and moving little picture. I loved every lunatic plot twist, every set piece. Everyone with a speaking part is fascinating to look at and even small things like Tom’s being a dogged reporter for local papers to Donna’s bizarre art projects to the places they go to drink and eat, this a world, a fascinating world of early 1980s people trying to exist in Reagan’s America, messy and baffling and angry. Vengeance is Mine probably belonged in the 1970s, because it sure doesn’t fit into the year that brought us Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, or even the cool of Amadeus or Blood Simple.

I’ve seen some people baffled at the many plot elements and wicked turns of Vengeance is Mine, and if you find this story unrealistic, I guess I would say be thankful that you haven’t had people in your life like this, acting in this way. It was almost too much for me, and it brought back some awful memories of my own, though I wasn’t going to leave that theater. Thankfully, oh so thankfully, there’s a “good” ending, cathartic, honest and necessary. According to Morris’ review, the director, Michael Roemer, escaped the Holocaust on the Kindertransport, and he almost seems to be borrowing Isaac Bashevis Singer’s sense of how past madnesses can scramble life the present, though in this case with gentiles. As Morris writes, “Paths of destruction that leave no obvious scar. Life just goes on, in a way that feels just a touch sociopathic.” That’s how we carry on, isn’t it, living in the wake of the insanity of our friends and family, with invisible scars but hopefully capable of a happiness that changes color through the years, a patina of wisdom that makes our final days more easily maneuverable. When I emerged from Vengeance is Mine, I was hopeful for Jo and Donna, and though I knew they would never have genuine peace until they died, I had a feeling they figured out how to endure.