Better In Your Head?--RAPE: A LOVE STORY

 

Spoiler Alert: love wins.

THE BOOK-Written by Joyce Carol Oates, released 2003

THE MOVIE (as "Vengeance: A Love Story")-Directed by Johnny Martin, written by John Mankiewicz, released 2017

THE STORY-Take the long way home, get the short end of the stick. Take the shore most strolled, feel reason recede under ceaseless waves of rage. If you dance too close, drink too much, flirt too long, well that's too bad. 

MIND THE GAP-Begins with brutality and doesn't let up. The POV switches between third and second person, the latter of which puts the reader in the position of a pre-teen girl forced to hear her mother's dehumanization. 

One bad decision subjects Teena Maguire to scornful eyes, disdainful ears and spiteful tongues, turning a fun-loving single mom into a self-loathing recluse. She is forced to process her trauma amid rancid gossip and perverted legal gamesmanship.

Fearlessness makes the difference. Joyce Carol Oates, for all her rampaging flaws, is a fearless scribe. Rape: A Love Story shines harsh light into corners others might cut. Vengeance: A Love Story is a formulaic excuse to pay Nic Cage so he could pay whoever he owed. I know "Nic Cage as a vigilante cop" may sound awesome, and I'm sure in some other movie it is, but this ain't the one. Don Johnson gives the movie's stand-out performance as a defense attorney who deserves to drown in his own gravy--and that fact is depressing.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-One of the most baffling adaptations ever. A painfully human, compellingly ugly work from an author of mind-blowing prolificacy, 150 pages of zero filler/hero killer, became a TV movie masquerading as a theatrical release. The book swept me along on a lava wave. The movie, conversely, is as engrossing as a dying lava lamp.

Look, I get the title change. But the change in focus is maddening. Vengeance is not Teena's. She's the victim, barely holding on in the wake of a vicious gang-rape that left her on death's welcome mat, in a town that's ostracized her and her young daughter for the sins of every woman. Vengeance is Officer John Dromoor's, the one-man army whose love can only be expressed through control.

Whatever you say about Rape: A Love Story, you cannot say it is shameless sensationalism. You cannot say it is a jaw-droppingly insipid, nose-to-toes failure. But when it comes to Vengeance: A Love Story, that's all you can say.