'Enough' is Just Enough

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

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Somehow, despite a script that shorthands characters, relationships and fight training, "Enough" delivers the kind of chilling, though predictable, moments that keep you in fear for the damsel in distress. It's kind of like going on a roller coaster. You know damned well you paid your money for a scare. You know damned well that the big drops are coming. But none of your complicity makes the big drops less scary.

The story is that a woman who everyone calls Slim (Jennifer Lopez), is working as a waitress when she meets Mitch, (Bill Campbell), who seems all gallant and a man's man. He's also rich. They marry and, eventually after the birth of their child, the misogynist rises out of him like a genie. He shows her what he thinks being a man is all about—ABSOLUTE CONTROL over the home and street, meaning that he can chase hussies in the street and then hit (both ways) his wife at home.

These years of their life are set up as a series of vignettes and given titles like "How They Met" and "To Have and To Hold." True, the format helps navigates the passage of time but cheapens the beginning of the story, rendering it like a soap opera and rendering Lopez and Campbell like soap opera stars. It also feels like the director thinks we're stupid and need to be led along by the bra strap.

Eventually Slim decides that being a kept-though-trampled woman is not good enough. She's just plain afraid of his crazy behind, and her face is starting to look like she dates Mike Tyson. (Oops. Did I say that?) When she decides to leave, the ABSOLUTE CONTROL dude get real ill. For the rest of the film, we hope that Slim and her young daughter will be able to find a safe and peaceful place away from Mr. Crazy.

More so than "Sleeping With The Enemy," this film paints a scary picture of the inner monster in men. It tells you that men sit around making sport out of who can nail what chick quicker, and, all the while, the woman thinks she's actually being courted or—silly girl—even loved. Campbell and Noah Wyle do a credible job of playing outside their good-guy television personas, from "Once and Again" and "E.R." respectively, but the script could have filled in their characters to make them better villains and to make the man-as-monster theme more credible.

J. Lo plays a good and tough damsel in distress, though she needs to work on her crying. But she is also given no personal story in the script. We don't know anything about her. We don't even know her real name. Perhaps the no-name thing is some arty attempt to make her an everywoman, but, in reality, she exists as a very competent shell, with no life outside her disastrous marriage.

Her appearance is interesting. Though, in the beginning scenes, she is shown tanned and kind of brown, she is, by any measure, playing a White woman here. Lopez is able "pass" on film in a way that at least one award-winning Black actress wishes that she could do as well. The dual life that Lopez lives—the down Puerto Rican singer performing with Ja Rule and the White actress in her films—creates a double consciousness when we see her. Until we are sure who she is at whatever particular moment, the question of her identity hangs in the air as a question. "Enough" tries to erase the question in part by giving her no past. Slim's mother is dead and she doesn't know her father. But, perhaps unwittingly, the film uses the hanging question to give it some social texture that it otherwise lacks. The only Black man who figures prominently here is a muscled brother who teaches Slim how to fight to the death. And the man she must fight, and maybe kill, is her White husband. There is no question about that.

Esther Iverem's film reviews also appear on BET.com

-- June 7, 2002

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