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Written by Gregg Shapiro
Nov 4, 2010
Janet Jackson in “For Colored Girls.” – Photo: Courtesy
Bryce Dallas Howard (left) and Matt Damon in “Hereafter.” – Photo: Courtesy
‘For Colored Girls’
(Lionsgate)
There’s little doubt that Tyler Perry wants his film version of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf” to be this year’s “Precious.” But the film falls short of that goal. Tyler Perry is no Lee Daniels.
Part of the problem is Perry’s screenplay. Expanding on the original text, “For Colored Girls” feels like it wants to be a hipper version of “The Women of Brewster Place,” with most of the characters living in the same New York apartment building. The language moves back and forth between traditional dialogue and the more performance-poetic voice of the play. The poetic tone exists mainly in the lead female character’s monologues and could potentially be off-putting as an obscure form of poet-speak.
A star-studded cast of strong female actors plays a myriad of characters in this made-for-film community.
Building manager Gilda (Phylicia Rashad) is a god-motherly woman who keeps a watchful eye on her tenants. Crystal (Kimberly Elise) lives with the physically abusive, alcoholic father of her children. Joanna (Janet Jackson) is a high-powered magazine editor with a persistent cough (is that foreshadowing caught in her throat?). Her latest husband is obviously on the Down Low.
There is also bartender and coke fiend Tangie (Thandie Newton in a cheap wig), Tangie’s mother, religious fanatic Alice (Whoopi Goldberg in a head wrap) and Tangie’s younger sister Nyla (Tessa Thompson). Juanita (Loretta Devine) runs an HIV-prevention workshop at the health center and is in a dead-end relationship.
The actresses, who clearly know the power and value of the original material, seem willing to do whatever is necessary to breathe life into their characters. Elise and Rashad are especially good.
But what should be a graceful, poetic and graphic dance with the themes of relationships, sisterhood, identity, rape, motherhood, faith, HIV, community, abortion, love and death is clumsy and wildly uneven. The unrelenting bleakness of watching the women experience an almost endless series of hardships and losses, with very little promise of hope, is difficult.
Perry’s handling of the down-low situation is questionable. It feels like he’s pandering to his devoted, religious and mostly female audience without providing a cultural context for the behavior (see the recent scandal involving African-American pastor Eddie Long). It’s one of a number of missed opportunities that make this long-overdue film adaptation such a major disappointment.
‘Hereafter’
(Warner Brothers)
Leave it to Clint Eastwood to make the afterlife as boring as, well, “Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil.” Following a spectacular opening sequence (the only spectacular thing in the film), involving a tsunami that devastates a seaside resort town in Thailand, we are served up a trio of low-key stories.
Marie (Cécile De France), a French TV personality who barely survives the tsunami, is haunted by the visions she witnessed as she teetered between life and death. Profoundly affected by the experience, Marie takes a sabbatical at the insistence of her producer/boyfriend Didier (Thierry Neuvic), to work on a book. But her original politically themed book proposal morphs into a project about, you guessed it, the hereafter.
Retired psychic George (Matt Damon) is urged by his money-hungry brother Billy (Jay Mohr) to return to the psychic business he abandoned for a quieter, less traumatic life. George tries to stay the course, but he reluctantly does a right-on reading for Christos (Richard Kind), which naturally backfires on him. A potential relationship with cooking-classmate Melanie (the vacant Bryce Dallas Howard) also goes awry when she insists on a reading and gets more than she bargained for.
British twins Marcus and Jason (Frankie and George McLaren) are as close as brothers can be, helping each other with homework and housework and covering for their irresponsible mother when child welfare services comes around to check on them. When Jason is killed, Marcus finds himself adrift and searching for a way to reconnect with his dead twin.
Of course, the stories of Marie, George and Marcus aren’t unrelated. Through the course of the movie, Marcus becomes aware of George, while George does the same in the case of Marie. By the time they finally merge and meet, at a book fair in London, you may think you have died—of boredom. Just check your pulse, you’re still here. And the credits are about to roll.
