For Oprah Winfrey Fans Who've Considered Victimhood When Too Many Coincidences Are Enough
For Colored Girls
Directed by Tyler Perry
Runtime: 134 min.
Decades after the cultural moment when black American theater was thriving, the movie For Colored GirlsTyler Perrys "serious" film of Ntozake Shanges 1974 "choreo-poem"feels like a throwback. It doesnt revive the post-Civil Rights, Black militant spirit of aggressive entitlement felt by radicalized (urban intellectual) black women who needed to talk back to that part of the worldincluding Eldridge Cleavers Soul On Ice chauvinismthat would hold them down. Instead, Perrys lugubrious film adaptation resembles pre-enlightenment. It is all too literally a "weepie." Perrys weakness for the lowest common denominator transforms both anger and affirmation into sludge, not great poetic cinema like Spielbergs The Color Purple, Jonathan Demmes Beloved or Rodrigo Garcias Mother and Child.
Supposedly set in contemporary New York City, For Colored Girls story of nine intergenerational women whose lives intersect actually occurs in conceptual art territoryCoincidenceville. The litany of miseries portrays common oppression, always at the hands of deceitful men or an unseen Patriarchy. Kimberly Elise plays a mother of two who lives with a disturbed war vet, Loretta Devine plays a community counselor with middle-age man trouble, Thandie Newton plays a rapacious bartender, Phylicia Rashad is the snooping landlady in the building they share. Anika Noni Rose plays an overly trusting dance instructor; Janet Jackson an imperious magazine editor with an untrustworthy husband; Whoopi Goldberg plays a religious fanatic hovering over her teenage daughter. Tessa Thompson, is a gal who hasnt yet left home, and Kerry Washington plays a social worker desperate to have a baby.
These actresses are all strong enough presences to render stage names unnecessary (the abstract rainbow-colored monikers Shange used are pointless given Perrys realistic pretext). The rarity of seeing so many womenespecially ethnically specific onesprovides the films only virtue. In the opening recitation their assorted voices declaiming a common Shange verse, briefly evoke an aural sense of commiseration. The versifying works better than the accompanying gauzy dance movements Perry stages. Right off, he doesnt know how to activate a graceful, theatrical metaphor for femaleness like Almodóvar created in the choreographed opening of Talk To Her or the great Rosie Perez dance Spike Lee used to personify urban American energy in Do the Right Thing. However, the overlapping and harmonizing vocal timbres do generate a palpable womanliness for which the term "girls" seems pitifully anachronistic.
Trouble began with Perrys title, which is truncated from the original For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Although its a dedication, it also segregates. This seems retrograde in the "post-racial" Obama era, conveniently harkening to the 1970s when the cultural mainstream embraced a radical chic fondness for black exclusivity that was also accusatory: It asserted a curious, exotic defiance. Todays perverse radical chic too-readily embraces black pathologylike last years scandalous Precious, which Perry publicly endorsed. Here he uses a similar self-deprecating mode as both marketing strategy and, more troublingly, to wallow in the effects of racism on black female identity. This, too, is a throwback. At the same time that Perry showcases his cast of black actresses, he mires them in tears, stereotypes and primitive agit-prop from which their huge talents cannot escape.
No doubt For Colored Girls will be sold (and misread) as a triumph of feminine expression but its oddly unliberating. The way dialogue lapses into poetry ("Sing a black girls song Let her be born and handled warm") clashes with the naturalistic presentation and blunt, TV-style imagery. Perrys technique crashes these anguished womens personal space; were in their faces, prying into their intimacy. He lacks the sensual, portraitists skill that helps Ingmar Bergmans and Mike Leighs actresses seem to reveal their souls, or that made Spielberg and Demmes film breakthrough in black female screen iconography.
Too often the offenses these women suffer (rape, battery, betrayal, abortion, disease, the B-word) play like public service announcements. Its the same P.C. trap that suckered naive viewers into defending the outrages in Precious as "dirty laundry." Audiences are eager to see African-American experience reduced to tragic social issues rather than as deeply imagined life. (Thats why film culture has yet to give The Color Purple and Beloved their due.) Strangely, Perry depends on such stigmatizing in order to pass off his crude speechifying and undigested neuroses as authentic. While avoiding freaky deaky Lee Daniels salacious sensationalismalthough a rape montage incorporating violence, opera and burnt pork chops comes closePerry indulges the Oprah Winfrey brand of mortified indignation where female victimhood is constant. Shamelessly substituting for the truth of black American life, it is little more than tear-streaked melodrama.
Despite the casts good efforts, Shanges themes of female self-denial and varieties of sexual guilt dont ignite. Cat fights between Goldberg and Newton, Goldberg and Thompson are nearly risible, lacking the primacy of the sex-and-religion battles Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie memorably acted out in Carrie. The camera is usually too close to make Newton and Roses expressive physicality register properly. Elise disastrously sobs her way through one crisis after another. Macy Grays cameo as a crazy abortionist only lacks MoNiques gutbucket raucousness. Rashad shows wise authority but her elderly counterpart, Devine, is often a hot mess of jumbled good intentions and weak will. (Devines sweet-natured reading of the famous monologue, "Somebody almost walked off with all of my stuff," flirts with Mammyness.)
For colored men, this movie is another scandalous put-down. Perry used to know better when his own movies explored spiritual distress and brought male villains to the altar of forgiveness, as in [Diary of a Mad Black Woman](/article-11197-oprah-movie-of-the-month-club.html). But in true Oprah-mode, these men are mostly bad news. This is where Shange required updating and Perry needed to confront marketplace hostility to the black male imagea problem bound up in the mainstreams preference for black female suffering. Demonizing the black male as a separate problem from racisms effect on black women keeps the denigration going. Janet Jacksons scenes with Omari Hardwicke as her alpha male husband on the downlow makes this uncomfortably clear. Jacksons masklike rectitude is way too haughty and solemn; their relationship is a preachy sketch that goes past maudlin to insult. Plus, Jacksons deprived any joy or sense of humor (including her bright family smile) that sometimes buoys Perrys plain talk and moral sincerity. Ironically, Perrys biggest mistakeand everything he leaves out about black male experienceis condensed in Hardwickes short-shrift lament, "Im sorry for my truth."
Back in the '80s, theater prodigy George Wolfe satirized Shanges sanctimony in his own play The Colored Museum. His "Mama on the Couch" skit mocked the clichés of black misery that have now become sacrosanct and that Perry's For Colored Girls reinforces. Perry turns politicized theatrical lyricism into cinematic hokum. His major trope is to move the camera in tighter as his tormented actresses drip tears. Perry provides less sensual and historical context for these sob stories than the soap-opera-style The Joy Luck Club and the mediocre Waiting to Exhale. And nothing here compares to the astonishing feminist bravery of Jennifer Lopezs pussy speech in [Gigli]a scene that was the true heir to Shanges boldness. This throwback to a dated form of female testimony isnt nearly sufficient. Even the first [Why Did I Get Married](http://www.nypress.com/article-17405-white-lies.html)? was more believable.
Perrys quasi-feminist artifice is an Oscar ploy. It eliminates the larger social history that made The Color Purple, Beloved and even the multiracial Mother and Child so powerful. The deprivations of slavery and racism were indispensable to understanding those gender relations (check out Goldberg, Newton, Elise and Washington in those films to see the difference). When Newton laments, "Being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I havent conquered yet," black female complaint congratulates white liberal guilt. Such outdated pathos makes For Colored Girls humanism specious. When empathy and comfort finally arrive in a group hug, the film is too beat-down to feel triumphant. Once again black pathology prevails while black film art sufferslike a battered woman in a Hollywood homeless shelter.