The Tyler Perry phenomenon continues unabated. Due to the surprise success of Diary of a Mad Black Woman (well, a surprise to everyone not already familiar with Tyler Perry’s cult of personality), in one year Perry devised the sequel, Madea’s Family Reunion. In many ways it is an obviously engineered sequel, right down to the former film’s breakout character now becoming titular (that’d be Madea, oh you inattentive ones). Between that and the repetition/escalation of certain other Diary elements, it seems Perry was responding to audience’s reactions.
In a way, he was…except he did so first in 2001. As with Diary, Family Reunion is an adaptation of a like-titled Perry stage play, which was itself a sequel to the play Diary was derived from. So whatever improvements occur in Family Reunion, excepting those having wholly to do with film itself, were likely learned five years earlier. Without direct reference to those productions, there’s the likelihood Perry was stagnating artistically by simply recycling his old works. Surely, the minor evolution between Diary and Family Reunion suggests so much.
Of pistol-toting Mammy granny Madea Simmons (Tyler Perry forever in a fat suit), “she” was a breakout character long before film, first appearing in Perry’s 1999 “I Can Do Bad All By Myself.” (Yes you surely can!) Because I’m actually high-fallutin’ enough to have yesterday compared Madea to Shakespeare, I’ll do so again today and call her Perry’s Falstaff. She (and her elderly brother Joe, whom Perry also performs) is a raging, out-of-place comic id in an unrealistic but self-serious soap opera. They are popular beyond their narrative importance, and so it makes sense for Perry to progress towards his “Merry Wives of Windsor”/Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back moment, and promote Madea towards leading role. That doesn’t happen in Family Reunion (I have a suspicion that moment is in Madea Goes to Jail), but the movie suggests it shall, for it’s not often a character so ultimately trivial earns her name in the title. (Such as “Waiting for Godot” or The Wizard of Oz or Jason Goes to Hell.)
Madea is the carrot to lure audiences in, same in 2006 as in 2001. She’s the honey on the wormwood (a Lucretius reference now, for I’m in an antiquarian mood today). Otherwise, Family Reunion is but Diary Redux, as familiar plot strands get slightly restated. Again we have a self-respecting beautiful black woman seeking guidance, a wealthy but evil dark-skinned romantic partner, and an alternate love interest. And resolving these “Apartment 3G” hijinks, indirectly, is the sage and slangy advice of beloved Madea, Queen of all Atlanta.
Actually, events are so familiar from before, even two films in I am compelled to list out the Tyler Perry tropes as I see them:
- A vaguely powerful wealthy man, evidently Satan made flesh
- His soulful, silent suffering wife/fiancé
- The lighter-skinned, blue-collar man, good in every way, and a calculated foil to the baddie
- Court scenes to send the plot in its direction
- A child on crack, looking for help
- Joe and Madea’s “yo mama” routines
- Helicopter footage of Atlanta , accompanied with R&B standards
- The jazz club date
- Joe farts
- Easy listening montages to show the passage of time, every 15 minutes
- Life lessons delivered by a wise, sassy older black women (Madea optional)
Actually, I’m kinda surprised no one’s come out yet to parody this rigid format. The Wayans Brothers circa 1990 would be ideal (I can’t believe I’m saying this!), in a I’m Gonna Git You Sucka sorta way. I almost feel inspired to do so myself, yet my Scotch-English ancestry makes that an impossibility.
Anyway, plugging new specifics into Perry’s program yields the protagonists we’ll be dealing with in Family Reunion:
The evil, wealthy man: Carlos (Blair Underwood). His differences from Diary’s Charles: He is an investment banker, not an attorney. (Six of one, half a dozen of another…). Similarities: The name “Charles” – c’mon, “Carlos”?! An actor best known from televised legal dramas – now “L.A. Law” in favor of “The Practice.” We’re two minutes into the movie, by the way.
His wife – No, wait, no! Here we get some changes, for the central conflicted black woman – Lisa Breaux in this case (Rochelle Aytes) – is merely Carlos’ fiancé. Her conflict with hubby is the same as before, however – Carlos is abusive (physically, not emotionally as Charles). It is undeniably, uncomplicatedly obvious she must leave him, and it’s all the more morally simple to argue this from Perry’s Christian point of view when divorce doesn’t come into play. It’s also a lot easier to credit as a realistic scenario, helping Family Reunion’s melodrama immensely.
There are shockwaves from making the central relationship an engagement. For one, Lisa is somehow not in a position to romance the inevitable light-skinned good man – here called Frankie (Boris Kodjoe, primarily a fashion model just like Shemar Moore), and now a bus driver instead of a steel worker. This is because, I hypothesize, a love triangle like that would be difficult to engineer under the highly specific moral guideline Perry follows. Basically, I imagine only the Diary divorce scenario would allow it, and that’d be just too repetitive.
Instead, Frankie is tossed over to Lisa’s sister Vanessa (Lisa Arrindell Anderson), who is basically a variation on Lisa…No, wait, that’s not entirely true. For one thing, Vanessa’s romance with Frankie has nothing weighing it down, so there’s no reason this shouldn’t be pure wish fulfillment. Instead, conflict comes of Vanessa’s doubt that Frankie could be that great a guy. He wants marriage, then kids, all that, as does she. It’s only because Vanessa questions Tyler Perry’s Marty Stus as much as I do that she hesitates. Oh, that and she has a Dark, Molestation-Filled Past – this is something else which is one film away from becoming a Perry cliché.
Splitting plot duties for two female protagonists over one is kind of interesting. There is another central relationship in Madea’s Family Reunion (and no, it too has zilch to do with Madea). That’s the sisters’ mother, Vanessa (Lynn Whitfield, lookin’ gooooooood). If we accept a central Perry theme is familial dysfunction, then the schism and dichotomy between these three women is definitely of value. Basically, Vanessa is pro-Lisa and anti-Victoria. It is she above all else who demands the marriage to Carlos, for the wealth it’ll bring the family – when Victoria is considered a disappointment for her comfortable middle-class existence. “Wealth begets cartoonish evil,” this is a repeated Perry premise, and thus it’s harder to become dramatically invested in Vanessa’s scheming – these archetypal exaggerations are an enduring issue with Perry’s work.
Dramatic sloppiness remains the name of the game. Everything boils down to monologues, as all Perry seemingly knows is to supply his characters with thesis statements. There’s often not even a personality there, but merely a fictional construct (a character) engineered to soap box Perry’s beliefs re: family, love, the essence of blackness… So when Madea’s Family Reunion reaches its arguable dramatic crescendo (5/8ths of the way through), it manifests as Lisa, Victoria and Vanessa reciting multi-page treatises to each other.
(Scene-ending dialogue, indicative of the entire movie: “I’m going to pray that God has mercy on your soul.”)
Here we get to a shared common ground between the Vs (I’ll admit I was repeatedly confused by the naming here – and it doesn’t help an actress named Lisa doesn’t play the character called “Lisa”). That common ground: Molestation! Huzzah! Everyone recovers lost memories – Vanessa is the result of her grandmother whoring her mother out for tricks and ye gods man! Those who feel “empowered” by Perry’s movies (mostly people who are not snarky 20-something whitey film bloggers) feel connections between these scenes and their own lives. For all of the “Funky Winkerbean”-esque cancer death in my own past, I feel blessed I am unable to relate to these revelations, though…though…okay, is it just me, or do these movies just feel like dramatized versions of daytime TV?
That’s no coincidence. From Oprah didst Perry emerge (she’s his artistic inspiration), from Oprah then didst he get her all-important seal of approval – just like Obama! It’s with Madea’s Family Reunion that Perry’s motion pictures started receiving the Big O’s promotion, as weepy extensions of her own empire. Perry in turn becomes an unlikely male doppelganger for Miss Winfrey. It follows that his films, though often critiqued for their failure as movies qua movies, appeal to those reducing a story’s quality to its thesis statement. It’s called pandering to the base and it makes anything anyone outside of Perry’s cabal says about him completely flaccid.
I mean, look at the audience for this movie: 52% of Family Reunion’s audience were black women over 35! This is the exact opposite of a mainstream movie aiming for all four quadrants. The Madea movies are surely not bland, and are remarkably niche. With tremendous popularity within a specific group, they have a guaranteed box office nearing $65 million per film, with that also a guaranteed ceiling. There’s no room for expansion (outside of the U.S., they earn usually under $20,000 – entirely from Canada), but there’s no need for it.
Yes, far from movies as we know ‘em, these are diatribes for feel-good empowerment. When the long-awaited family reunion comes into play (still no word on Madea…), it is a chance for punditry. Perry manifests a gaggle of elder black women, to speak the single truth in this world to all the assembled generations. Led by great-great-great-grandmother May (Maya Angelou, basically playing herself – Pulitzer Prize winning poet of black womanhood), the brigade speechifies on the good ol’ ways and a return to family values.
It feels legitimately political, like Malcolm X meets Minister Farrakhan meets Mister Rogers – and here Perry speaks most specifically to the black experience, for his first truly racial commentary. Because the older women who watch these movies thoughtlessly espouse the ideals of some vague “few decades ago” as life’s ultimate perfection, that’s just what is argued here. It feels calculated, though I do not doubt Perry’s sincerity. What this ten minute pause isn’t is good storytelling. This reminds me most of Plato – that’s in terms of drama, and Plato wasn’t a dramatist. With the theme of love, it’s Tyler Perry’s “Phaedrus” or “Symposium.” (While in Greece, I’ll also admit for a while I thought “Madea” was “Medea,” Euripides’ play on a vengeful wife scorned. Turns out Perry never cites that drama.)
The fact that I keep referencing antique Western culture suggests there is little in Perry’s work which is distinctly cinematic. He remains the professional amateur, but with Madea’s Family Reunion Tyler Perry grows in one majorly important way. While already the writer, actor and producer, Perry now becomes director as well – his first film! Given Darren Grant’s workmanlike direction of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Perry is a fine replacement. We lose only a little of Grant’s technical acumen, but it was unwanted. Though Family Reunion is one visually drab picture – even sans filterers, it’s one of the brownest movies I’ve ever seen, and I’m referring to the background here – it improves upon Diary in one important arena: the performances. Oh no, there’s nothing resembling subtlety, but stagebound Perry knows what he needs of his actors, to best serve the message, and he accomplishes it here. Whether you like the outcome, this movie is precisely what it ought to be.
Now…last time I compared Perry to Thomas Kinkade, and other purveyors of unintentional kitsch – the sort which is wholeheartedly embraced by artistically disinclined audiences. Perry the director sure doesn’t disappoint! When forced to present his ideas of visual beauty, he climaxes the movie (post-reunion) with a wedding of the utmost chintz! It’s meant to be a reflection of taste and goodness (because this is where Victoria and Frankie wed – and trade perfectly-written spur-of-the-moment vows)…so it’s all the more damning the wedding just reeks of Koonsian consumer false consciousness. Let’s see, we got live human angels dangling from the rafters playing their harps, we got an ersatz Eiffel Tower plopped on the altar for no reason except Paris is associated with romance, we got flashing lights everywhere.
As a visual, this sums up my impression of Tyler Perry movies. They are like artlessly positive Christmastime postcards. They employ a middlebrow sensibility thoroughly divorced from the notion of the artist as anything but a provider of pleasing comfort. This is my complaint, which has nothing to do with race or even niche audiences in general, but is all about a profound unadventurousness.
(Footnote: Oh, Madea is in this movie, and she’s in it throughout – it’s not just a cameo. And yet she’s obviously pretty tertiary. Basically, she functions no differently than in Diary of a Mad Black Woman, so there’s nothing more to add. It’s odd that she, the franchise element, is so minor thus far. And here we reach the inescapable truth: The Madea Simmons franchise is character-driven, not sequel-driven. Like a literary author recycling his favorite character in the background of otherwise-independent stories, Perry’s movies are all in a single universe, but aren’t necessarily of one continuity. Madea shall return as the unifying element, joining distinct movies.)
RELATED POSTS:
• No. 1 Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005)
• No. 3 Meet the Browns (2008)
• No. 4 Madea Goes to Jail (2009)
• No. 5 I Can Do Bad All By Myself (2010)
• No. 6 Madea's Big Happy Family (2011)
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