Jamal Hill

(On TV, September 2021) It’s not always easy to distinguish between a film that audaciously takes chances and one that simply doesn’t quite understand what it’s doing, and BET-broadcast The Available Wife had me more flummoxed than usual in its final moments. I suspect that part of the problem is how I first approached the film, expecting an upbeat drama and getting a glum thriller in return. Much of the plot revolves around a music company CEO who gets involved with a sexy/dangerous artist. If you’re expecting this to be a formula story of how a plucky woman manages to work her way up the industry and fend off threats to her marriage… The Available Wife has more on its mind. Perhaps too much. As director Jamal Hill advances the story, we steadily lose sympathy for a protagonist who blows up her marriage for a man who (predictably) proves to be violent and manipulating. It gets worse when the ellipse between prologue and early film is filled out to reveal that she slept and cheated her way to the ownership of the music company (first by sleeping with the owner, then by producing a fraudulent will). By the time the third act rolls by, with our protagonist having blown up her marriage, willingly allied herself with a dangerous criminal, ignored warnings from friends and family, and revealed to be a scheming fraudster, we’re left to wonder — why exactly are we supposed to cheer for her, or even care? You could argue that the early moments of The Available Wife, portraying the younger protagonist as an artist spouting familiar female empowerment messages, are a clever misdirection, aiming to pull the rug underneath us when the film becomes a tragedy of ambition. But that’s an insanely generous way of looking at things, considering that when you take a look at the film in retrospect, those early sequences absolutely do not pay off later on. Hence The Available Wife getting knocked down by ambitious genre-switching to simply a film that doesn’t know what it’s doing. It’s not that much of a stretch—any film that lets Roger Guenveur Smith overact so badly in a caricatural role is not a fine-tuned machine. I’m not saying that I disliked The Available Wife — it’s got swagger, some good technical credentials, pacing moves quickly (perhaps too quickly, as in an attempt to palm a few cards), and K. J. Smith is beautiful enough that the film doesn’t miss featuring a spectacular lingerie scene. But as promising as some of the elements can be (let’s face it — murder and betrayal at the top of the music industry sounds like a can’t miss premise), the execution is too scattered and uncontrolled to be effective. By the time The Available Wife’s final verdict comes down, the protagonist goes to prison and the audience can only applaud the decision — is this what the entire thing was really working to achieve?