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| Consoling each other after what Tyler Perry's script did to them; the cast of For Colored Girls (l to r): Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Janet Jackson, Kimberly Elise, Phylicia Rashad, Loretta DeVine, Tessa Thompson, and Thandie Newton |
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
I understand the need for Tyler Perry.
He employs black actors, amazingly talented black actors who can’t get work in Hollywood (unless they’re willing to be new millennium versions of mammies, whores, welfare queens, toms, thugs and studs). One wonders why. Racism is one possible explanation. Another is economic: pandering to the desires of racist audiences who, according to conventional Hollywood wisdom, don’t like to see films (particularly serious dramas) about black people—especially if the blacks are depicted in ways which defy white expectation and white imagination. (A well-adjusted black female attorney who’s married to a successful black surgeon and has intelligent black children and the film is not a comedy? Impossible! Everyone knows niggers are drug-addicted, welfare-abusing single mothers!)
But I think there’s one other explanation: Hollywood is afraid of the competition. I think they’re terrified that these brilliant actors, whom they ignore and disenfranchise, might actually be better than the white actors they employ and promote. For example, do you remember the movie Doubt? How long was Viola Davis on the screen? Seven minutes? How long did it take her to steal that scene most resolutely from Meryl Streep, a woman considered to be one of the greatest (white) actors of all time? Let me tell you: All Davis needed was two minutes to render Streep completely invisible. The sometimes subtle/sometimes overt white supremacist propaganda we are bombarded with in almost every Hollywood film couldn’t possibly remain intact if black actors proved themselves equal and, in some cases, superior to their white counterparts. Therein lies the panic.
But that doesn’t change the fact that these black actors have earned a place at the table. And Perry provides that. The food at the table might be a little stale (okay, a lot stale), but stale food is better than no food at all.
No matter how simple and uncomplicated his characters and plots are, Perry presents a view of black life that often defies Hollywood’s myopic, negative and stereotypical depictions. In his films, black people are permitted to have their own lives, to be successful, to be heroes. They aren’t simply the white star’s (apparently) celibate, you-go-girl best friend; they’re not just the inner city black kid who needs a white savior to show him how to be a civilized human being. Nobody drives Miss Daisy’s entitled, lily-white ass around in his films; and as a black person, I so appreciate that. Perry doesn’t always avoid black stereotypes (and when he doesn’t, the results are just as egregious as Hollywood’s; I will get to that in a moment), but in most cases, he at least attempts to put them in their proper context and present enough counter images to balance the scale (unlike, say, Lee Daniels’s Precious, which, ironically, Perry executive produced).
But I also need to be honest: Perry is a horrible writer and a dreadful director. His power lies solely in his ability to produce these films and provide work for the unemployed.
Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls (based on the poem/play For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange) is enough to make someone want to commit suicide no matter how many rainbows there are. It’s schizophrenic: When Shange’s verses are being recited, it’s like listening to a symphony. And then Tyler Perry’s dialogue stomps in—tone-deaf and uninvited—like a little boy still receiving piano lessons, but wants to chime in with his Casio keyboard anyway.
Can you imagine what we would have been blessed with—what For Colored Girls could have been—had Perry been selfless enough to allow Kasi Lemmons (of Eve’s Bayou fame) to direct this, if he had been gracious enough to let Nzinga Stewart’s screenplay see the light of day? Maybe then we wouldn’t have had to endure the clumsiness of scenes like the one between Whoopi Goldberg and Thandie Newton in which both women recite different Shange poems at the same time. I think I know the effect that Perry was going for here, but it fails and the result is noisy.
Nevertheless, there are some remarkable performances in this film, most notably from Anika Noni Rose. Nothing else in the film rises to the level of the scene where, after being brutally attacked, she recounts the incident, using Shange’s poetry, to a police officer. She is music and heartbreak and genius. She deserves an Oscar, an Image Award or any other accolade they’d be lucky enough to bestow upon her.
Kimberly Elise was another stand out, expertly modulating grief with a profound sensitivity and strength. Janet Jackson was surprisingly convincing as a cruel executive. Phylicia Rashad was regal and graceful. Goldberg, despite what critics have said, was a turbulent force. Macy Gray was frightening. And newcomer Tessa Thompson has a very bright future ahead of her indeed. My only gripes were with Newton, who seemed, to me, inauthentic; and Kerry Washington, whose presence was almost not felt at all. The men were completely interchangeable: light-skinned studs; mostly toxic and potentially deadly (even the "good cop" carries a weapon).
Ms. Shange must be pissed that someone as untalented as Perry got a hold of her work, but has been kind enough not to call him out. I watched an interview in which she said she was promised that Madea would not show up in the film. Whoever made that promise is a liar. Loretta DeVine’s character is a Madea stand-in: darker, a tad more serious and a little more intelligent, but serving the exact same purpose: to enlighten hardheaded viewers (by beating them over the head with public service announcements) while making them laugh.
You know, I think I understand Perry’s appeal. When you’re a member of the audience at a Perry film, the feeling is very similar to being member in the audience at a black church: the Church of God in Tyler Perry. Given the manic, oppressively Christian themes in his work, I wasn’t the least bit surprised by the film’s homophobic complicity. Janet Jackson’s character is married to a man who is revealed to be on the “down low” and has also infected her with HIV. He’s introduced as the villain early on when he’s caught receiving head from a man in some dark Brooklyn alley. Later on, he looks at the ass of a man he passes in the street. Later still, he cruises a guy at an opera. These scenes were, oddly enough, the most nuanced and authentic in the film, as though the director knew the topic intimately.
The audience I was a member of, compromised of mostly black women, never missed a beat. Chants of “See!” and “Uh huh!” and “Can’t trust these down-low niggers!” soon followed. And when Janet’s character finally confronts her husband and reads him the riot act, the audience erupted. As though they had just heard their pastor read from Leviticus or quote some Pauline condemnation, women shouted, “That’s right!” “You gotta watch out for them damn pretty boys; they the ones that always turn out to be faggots!” “Faggot!” “Punk!” “Sissy ass!” “What happened to all the real fuckin’ men?” Over two hundred women cheered, urged each other on and applauded.
What could have been a very interesting discussion about sexuality, gender identity and patriarchal masculinity devolved into an Eddie Long-like homophobia fest—which, I suppose, is the danger in placing subject matter so complex in the hands of a simpleton. I’m not certain what Perry hoped to accomplish with the down-low storyline, but what he managed to do was magnify the fear and loathing of the women in his audience. And that’s a shame given the facts.
In the end, For Colored Girls is a study in contradictions: poetry and cliché; horrible writing and wonderful acting; salvation and damnation; a call for tolerance and an invitation to intolerance; a psalm and a shitty mess.
Someone owes Ms. Shange a tremendous apology.