Review: Enough

The drama has been seemingly extracted from all sorts of domestic abuse manuals and pamphlets and the result is strangely akin to a Lifetime see-Jane-run procedural.

Enough
Photo: Columbia Pictures

Michael Apted’s Enough begins with a “hey” between a waitress and a “conquering hero,” then quickly moves to their “to have and not to hold” and a “more than enough” some six years later when the hero inexplicably embraces domestic abuse after he’s caught with his pants down. Perhaps egged on by the film’s ridiculous intertitles (used here to suggest a kind of de-evolving, photo-album relationship between man and wife), Mitch (Billy Campbell) punches his wife, Slim (Jennifer Lopez), soon after little Gracie (Tessa Allen) has been put to bed. What with writer Nicholas Kazan’s 12-step attention to domestic violence and a David Arnold score that goes bump-with-every-punch, Enough feels an awful lot like an instructional video for a women’s clinic with you-go-girlism on the agenda. Slim is understandably oblivious to the boogeyman’s wedding-day foreshadowing (“You’re safe with me”) yet she’s quick to run soon after the first punch. The drama has been seemingly extracted from all sorts of domestic abuse manuals and pamphlets and the result is strangely akin to a Lifetime see-Jane-run procedural. Mitch has eyes all over the country, which pushes Slim to get creative: she runs straight to a microfiche, snags a faux birth certificate and gets a haircut. Kazan throws Slim a bone with the film’s ridiculous long-lost father subplot but, in the end, he’s less concerned with mending father-daughter wounds than he is with giving his protagonist a steady flow of income. Experts may scoff at the film’s ghoulish, one-dimensional view of a long-gestating domestic violence but Enough is about as authentic a portrait of such terror as A Beautiful Mind was an accurate representation of insanity. Sure, Lopez kicks major ass but there’s something reprehensible about a film less concerned with the plight of abused women than it is with beating them up for cheap thrills.

Score: 
 Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Russell Milton, Bill Campbell, Tessa Allen, Juliette Lewis, Dan Futterman, Chris Maher, Noah Wyle  Director: Michael Apted  Screenwriter: Nicholas Kazan  Distributor: Columbia Pictures  Running Time: 105 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2002  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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