Tyler Perry's Down-Low Hysteria

SPOILER ALERT: The following article reveals key plot points from the film For Colored Girls. 

COMMENTARY: I was rooting for Tyler Perry. I wanted him to win. To prove all of his critics wrong. To finally achieve the respect from Hollywood that has eluded him for his entire career — the respect that seems to only be an afterthought publicly for Perry in the midst of his multimillion-dollar entertainment empire, legions of devoted fans, and media mogul status, but privately must be as important to him as it is to those who defend his desire to be considered a legitimate filmmaker.

I wanted to love For Colored Girls, and I wanted a new generation of women and men who may not have experienced the power of Ntozake Shange’s original work to cry, feel, dance, sing, and marvel at the beauty of her words and the experiences of so many incredible black women as they leaped from the page to the screen in Perry’s adaptation.

This did not happen. Instead what Perry gave us was a version of Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf that is barely recognizable. If it were not for Shange’s poetry interwoven into the typical Perry melodrama randomly assigned to his gifted actors, this film could have been any number of Perry’s previous efforts minus the mature and often intense subject matter.

There is a clear distinction between Perry’s and Shange’s contributions to the impostor that bears the name of the Tony-nominated Broadway play that’s currently in theaters. Shange’s words and intentions soar, while Perry is seemingly intent on bringing her down to earth and packaging the complexity of the women whom she writes about in an accessible soap opera format filled with religious overtones to be consumed by the faithful.

The resilience and strength of black women that has carried us through slavery, segregation, and broken homes and that is present in Shange’s original is nowhere to be found in the film; its characters are downtrodden, down low, down and out, and without hope. Once again black women are the victims and black men are the predators and cause of their pain.

This could not be more evident than in the Perry-crafted story line
between Janet Jackson’s character, Jo, and her down-low husband, played
by Omari Hardwick, which served as the source of my ire and the catalyst
for numerous antigay slurs that were hurled at the screen by the
audience in my theater.