Some movies simply resist criticism, and any attempt at logically evaluating their flaws and virtues is doomed to failure. Like all articles of faith, these movies inevitably draw a line in the sand; you either get what Adam Sandler's doing in Happy Gilmore or you don't, just as you're either on board with Mel's Passion or you're not. And to that short list of critic-proof movies we can now apparently add anything by Tyler Perry.
If you have to ask who Tyler Perry is, then there's a good chance you're already on the wrong side of his line in the sand. Perry is a cult phenomenon on the rise, an Altanta-based entertainer who has written, produced and starred in a half-dozen plays that have toured around the country, whipping audiences into a frenzy with their calculated blend of rousing gospel music, melodrama, low-brow humor and fervent messages of religious devotion. In most of these plays, Perry performs in drag as Madea, a pistol-packing African-American grandma who, despite her aggressive and sometimes raunchy ways, can ultimately be counted on for good advice about the merits of strictly adhering to God's Plan.
A confession: Before experiencing Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the first movie to be based upon one of Tyler Perry's plays, I was a Perry virgin. The name was so completely unknown to me, in fact, that I might have guessed it was just some hybrid of the guys who wrote Walk This Way, which probably tells you more than a little about the particular demographic to which I belong. Diary of a Mad Black Woman's target audience is church-going folk of color, specifically women, which leaves me in the cold on at least three counts. If only for the sake of a little healthy argument, however, permit me to cross the movie's invisible line in the sand with an outsider's perspective.
Attending a Perry production is a lot like going to church, at least if your church is the kind that encourages maximum participation from the congregation and a lively give-and-take between preacher and preached-to. There was no preacher per se at the packed screening of Diary that I attended (a screening attended almost exclusively by African-American women), but the movie itself served as a surrogate, and the audience happily talked back to the screen at regular intervals, offering advice and encouragement to the characters, shouting out enthusiastic affirmations at appropriate moments.
At one point, when a spurned on-screen character moaned, "He was my everything," only to be admonished that "God is your everything," the audience nearly rose up out of their seats in unison, responding as one voice with a resounding "Amen!"
If only Diary of a Mad Black Woman were as interesting as its audience's reaction to it. As a motion picture, at least to this observer, Diary is inconsequential stuff at best, and stunningly idiotic at worst (or maybe it's the other way around), the by-the-numbers tale of a sweet little mouse of a housewife named Helen (Kimberly Elise) who is summarily dumped by her rich, callous hubby, but eventually finds happiness with a new, impossibly perfect boyfriend.
In between the recycled How Helen Got Her Groove Back While Waiting to Exhale shtick, we get arbitrary interludes of vaguely mean-spirited slapstick, awkward cutaways to Perry making a fool of himself in drag (in addition to Madea, he plays two other characters, including a flatulent old coot shamelessly ripped off from Eddie Murphy's Papa Krumpp), and, sandwiched between the fart jokes, more messages about God's Glory.
Scattered throughout are moments of unintentional high hilarity, my personal favorite being that darned near perfect instant when Helen's voice-over dreamily muses about the new man in her life. "He's strong, sensitive, beautiful," she gushes, allowing the slightest hint of a pregnant pause to insinuate itself, "and Christian." Matt Stone and Trey Parker would kill for lines like these.
Kimberly Elise is an uncommonly good actress (she was flat-out tremendous in Woman, Thou Art Loosed), but you wouldn't know it from her work here – and she's by far the best thing in this movie. The acting style of preference in Diary of a Mad Black Woman is of the bulging eyeballs, flaring nostrils variety that would have seemed dated back at the dawn of the sound era (we half-expect a sneering, top-hatted villain to materialize, twirling the pointy ends of a waxed moustache), and everybody wears whatever emotions they have right on their sleeves.
There's barely a sliver of subtlety or nuance to any of these characters (nor to the story), but the whole uncomplicated, two-dimensional nature of the project probably just adds to its appeal, at least to the movie's built-in audience, few of whom will be coming for subtlety or surprises.
The bottom line is that Diary of a Mad Black Woman is a passion play with a guy in drag (who could ask for anything more?), a story whose monumental simplicity only increases the single-minded power of its message. Slapstick and cross-dressing aside, this is a story told to reassure the faithful who already know it by heart (at the Diary screening I attended, the audience occasionally mouthed lines of dialogue even before the characters did). Perry seems clueless that his so-called "serious" material is even more susceptible to ridicule (at least to outsiders) than when he's putting on a dress and attaching some enormous fake boobs to himself, but that hardly matters.
Perry is no dummy and, even more important, he seems absolutely sincere in both his faith and in his desire to connect with his audience. When the religious messages get too heavy, there are gags, followed by an upbeat tune, followed by regurgitated faux-Hallmark greeting card wisdom (sample: "What happened to her?" says A, to which B responds, "Life.")
Perry's faith-and-farts-based revival meeting is ham-fisted, cliché-ridden, preachy and, charitably speaking, not particularly smart, but so what? Say what you will, but this is one movie that gets the job done – at least if you're on the right side of that line in the sand.
lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2005.