It was Friday, a balmy Fall afternoon and the opening day of the Tyler Perry new movie, “Colored Girls”, an adaptation of the choreo-poem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” I had seen the stage version written by Feminist playwright, Ntozake Shange when it was first produced at the New Federal Theatre in New York in 1976,
I am not a Tyler Perry fan per se, but I have seen a few of his movies. My reason for going to see this particular one was inspired by my great curiosity as to how he had adapted Shange’s seamy seminal work to film, centered on five Black women living on the edges and in the pits of America’s dispersed ghettos (New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco Baltimore and St. Louis) -- each one suffering mental anguishes and physical abuse from men, and myriad turmoil laden on these urban landscapes thirty years ago. Whew.
In the stage version, each woman is identified by a different color of the rainbow and the color brown. The through line of all their stories is told through dance and poetry: their allusions of grander past lives in Ancient Egypt, their dreams of being safe in love and their fears of living in isolation in this life time.
It was about a month ago, when I caught the tail-end of Oprah’s interview with Perry and learned that he’s the second most influential man in Hollywood, after film director James Cameron, of “Titanic” and “Avatar” fame. She also mentioned an Island that he owns. My!
In the interview, Tyler talked about the creative challenges he faced in translating the complexity of Ms. Shange’s work to film. He seemed very humbled by this, in terms of his responsibility to respectfully deliver Ms. Shange’s masterpiece to the movie going audience.
Tyler Perry phenomenal success is grounded in years of catering to a specific audience (predominantly black woman) who have invested in hi s plays and more recently, his movies. Evidence of this is when I arrived to the Regal Cinema in Brooklyn, where the majority of ticket buyers were females from teenage girls to senior citizens. Very few men came.
There were no male performers in the choreo play. For the movie the male characters are fleshed out and euphemistically thrown up on the screen. Collectively they are bad news: the crazed war veteran slash, wife beater, slash drug addict slash child killer slash, prisoner, a two-timing/thieving boy friend and the undercover homosexual husband, all of whom are intertwined in story lines the women share in woeful and wishful soliloquies, cultivated in the slangs and colloquialism, true to the times in which the choreo play was written.
As for the lovely young female actors, each one gave believable performances The stand out talent for me was British actress Thandie Newton’s portrayal of the sexually uninhibited/free woman who uses her mind and body to transgress the mental pain of her having been molested by her father when she was a girl.
As for the well-seasoned divas of stage and screen -- Loretta Devine, portrays a woman with a big heart who helps other women in their struggles with men, and at the same time holds her heart in her hands, for the man she sleeps with and who steals from her. Phylliscia Rashad character holds the keys to all the apartments in the building where she is in charge. She plays the imperious bearer of tough love and is nosey. Disappointingly, Whoopi Goldberg’s characterization of a conjure woman was a stretch. Particularly given her noteworthy genius of having craftily morphing into other people in her long career. In this role she seemed to be caught between a hard place of w Pentecostal Preacher Woman and the rock of a Santeria Priestess. There was no where she could run, we h45 character veered between someone who is as crazy as a bed bug and the concerned mother of her daughters. Perhaps she was on the verge of nervous breakdown, as her spasmodic rants, repeatedly cried out to no one in particular “Elohiem”, (Hebrew for God); a term which I speculate went way over the heads of most of the audience in the theater.
In Perry’s reveal (camera overshot) of the kitchen table abortionist, it seemed to me that he was making a different movie then the one I had been watching for almost two hours. He had obviously made a huge creative leap back to the past, while completely overlooking that we are living in the 21st Century. Clearly his choice to have kitchen table abortionist who’s’ doctor bag is filled with macabre tools that look like something a dentist in the 1800s used to pull teeth ,and which she sterilized with home made booze ,was incongruously ludicrous. The actor in this role (I didn’t recognize) seemed to have seeped out of the Sci -Fi channel.
The production budget for set design, left no detail unturned, in particular the huge, shadowy and well-appointed bedroom located in the chilly and unhappy home of the Noir Riche bitch astutely portrayed by Miss Janet Jackson. The backdrop is where she and husband are having a heart to heart about his sexual attraction to men. The perfectly made king size bed, serving, I felt, as a land mine the couple dare not tread. This gorgeous set, gave a nod to the set design style of the classic Film Noir period of films made the 1930s. Great work!
OMG, in another well appointed atmosphere, I almost chocked on my popcorn while my eyes popped and were then glued to the scene as I watched Miss Janet Jackson, who plays a women at the helm of a fashion magazine. She is standing in her high rise office and high heels, amongst her trembling staff. The visual is was all too familiar: Jackson knocking off of Vogue Editor Anna Wintour, who was previously knocked off by actress Meryl Streep, in the role she played in ‘The Devil Wears Prada” – or was it Willamina Slater , played by Vanessa Williams in "Ugly Betty".
Signing off,
Moi, Mahmoudah
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