Mad Bad Madea
Madeas Family Reunion Directed by Tyler Perry
Any critic who condescends Tyler Perry hasnt seen his films with a paying audience. Madeas Family Reunion, Perrys follow-up to his smash hit Diary of a Mad Black Woman is the sort of film that invites murmurs of delight or disapproval, gales of laughter and the occasional half-embarrassed sob. This is the kind of movie where the villains behave so atrociously that half the audience bands together to rebuke them. To watch Madeas with a paying crowd is to understand that popular movie storytelling is alive. Not necessarily alive and well, mind you, but alive.
Perry, an Atlanta-based theater legend who followed his screenwriting/producing/scoring/acting vehicle Diary by adding director to his list of credits, is a fumble-fingered theatrical carpetbagger whose imagination is chained to the proscenium arch. A few genuinely cinematic touches appear: sharply-timed violent surprises and an opener in which CGI rose petals tumble over helicopter footage of Atlanta, form into credits, then merge into a trail of real petals that leads to a sleeping womans bed. Otherwise, Perry comes across as an amateur who thinks of the camera mainly as a recording machine; a means of preserving his Southern-fried homilies (It aint what people call you, its what you answer to) and his prosthetics-and-slapstick clowning.
Like Diary, Madea features Perry in multiple roles, including flatulent Uncle Joe, strait-laced single dad Brian and Mable Madea Simmons, a cranky but warmhearted matriarch who tough-loves her extended family out of jams.
Madea agrees to take in a smart-mouthed, hard-case girl whos been shunted from one foster home to another. Of course the girl flowers under Madeas watchful eye and punishing strap. One of Madeas nieces, Lisa (Rochelle Aytes), is about to wed a rich sociopath (Blair Underwood) who beats her when he isnt pampering her in bizarre ways (he hires a classical ensemble to score her bubble bath).
Meanwhile, Lisas sister Vanessa (Lisa Arrindell Anderson) gets wooed by another Perry archetype, the super-hunky, single Christian dad (Boris Kodjoe), but she cant commit due to emotional damage inflicted by her cold, whorish mother (the great Jenifer Lewis, whose smashingly unsympathetic performance recalls Joan Crawford).
Perrys directorial inexperience keeps breaking the movies spell. Some of his exposition is just plain awful, and he lets the films momentum flag by inserting too many prosthetics-dependent improvs. A tearful monologue in the movies third act invites derision because the actress performance is too big and intense for the tight close-up that encloses it.
In any case, theres no denying Perrys ability to seduce the audience into hopping into a stylistic time machine, following him back to the golden age of goofball slapstick and melodramatic womens pictures (the 1930s through the 50s), then watching as he tries to mix these seemingly incompatible genres. The combo works better than you think. Rookie clumsiness notwithstanding, no American director shifts so fluently between slapstick, melodrama and moral fervor. Plus theres a depth to Perrys vision of black life thats easy to miss when youre laughing or sniffling.
At this early stage, Perrys films are more curious than impressive, but they still deserve respect as genre-fusing entertainment, as records of a particular time and place in black America, and as reminders of an era when even the klutziest films connected with life.