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Tangie (Thandie Newton), left, and her mother Alice (Whoopi Goldberg) squabble about her morals in Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls.” |
When a Tyler Perry movie actually gets screened for critics, you know it must be something special.
“For Colored Girls” is special, especially for a Tyler Perry movie.
It offers a sterling cast of actresses who act their hearts out, using the rough and tumble poetry of Ntozake Shange’s stage play to vent their anger and lament their disappointments in modern Shakespearean soliloquies delivered in rumbles of quiet thunder.
“For Colored Girls” also represents a big step for actor/director/writer/producer Perry, whose string of financially successful (mostly) comedies (“Madea’s Family Reunion,” “Why Did I Get Married?” and others) never ventured beyond stock characters and dull, constrained visuals tailor-made for TV.
Perry steps way, way out of his comfort zone to make “For Colored Girls,” a project slightly beyond his storytelling limitations, and he winds up treating Shange’s creation as a Tyler Perry movie on raging hormones.
Perry isn’t up to epic mode here, so he falls back on what he knows, and that means more stock characters and visual flairlessness. But not nearly as stock and flairless as his previous works.
“For Colored Girls” follows an ensemble of nine African American women who, unlike the geographically scattered characters in Shange’s 1975 Tony-nominated “choreo-poem,” now all live in Harlem apartments, except for Jo (Janet Jackson), a publishing magnate whose male-ego driven hubby (Omari Hardwick) has not been faithful. (Read more…)