From a Colored Girl with thoughts on "for colored girls"

(This has been waiting for me to finally edit and post.)

I finally saw the movie and my review is...meh.  I prefer the play.

A few years ago, my local PBS station aired a televised adaptation in the 1980s that starred Lynne Whitfield and Alfre Woodard, and I at that time, I lamented that there were few, if any, playwrights as bold as Ntozake Shange.  I might have even cited Mr. Perry as the best example of what was being offered--and how it was not even in the same league in terms of complexity, sophistication and intent.  I saw this stage adaptation as a child and in reflecting on my childhood impressions of it, and the mature themes were so over my head that I should not have had such positive and lasting memories of it.  But I did.  And I am so happy that I had those memories going in to see Perry's film version (alongside the positive impressions of having read the poem in college.)

I was disappointed by the thin narrative that was created as the vehicle for presenting this work.  While I liked the idea of the women all living in the same apartment building or having overlapping interactions with each other in the same block, I was not convinced that these lives would have interacted so easily in 2010 as they did in the 1970s.  In the original work, part of the excitement was the awareness of self and the awakening of black women on the tail end of the women's movement as relevant themes.  But when you fast forward 35+ years to the future and try to tell the same story in our time, a lot gets lost in translation.

In this film, the woman in orange becomes the older sister to the woman in purple and their mother is a deranged woman in white.  The woman in brown works as the executive assistant to the woman in red who blows off the woman in green when she makes a charity call.  The woman in blue is a social worker who visits the women in brown to check in on her children; the woman in yellow is a dance instructor who teaches the woman in purple.  The woman in gray (?) is the apartment manager in the building where orange and brown live on the same floor as neighbors.  The woman in green stops by this apartment building to check in on her man who lives downstairs, while the woman in yellow walks by this same building everyday on her way to her dance studio. 

And beyond that, there is little that truly binds these women to each other.  These are superficial relationships, which certainly are plausible, but in our modern times, superficial means that we barely see each other on the street, let alone care enough to notice.  This thin thread that supposedly connects these women is problematic for a film that depends on some type of interaction among its characters to make any sense.  Not that it is totally improbable, but the thinness of their connections reveals itself as the film unfolds.  Why is the woman in orange estranged from her younger sister in purple?  And why would she send her naive younger sister to another deranged woman in white for help (portrayed by Macy Gray with such intensity that it was easily one of the most haunting performances)?  And in 2010, there is a such thing as Macy Gray's woman in white?  And why would the woman in red be perceptive enough to notice her husband's wandering eye but not so much as to notice the abuse inflicted on the woman in brown, her assistant?  And the woman in blue was the link to all of them?  Really?

The narrative structure was not the only problem with this film.  I listened to a review that suggested that Perry inserted himself into this film in several not so subtle ways, and I have to agree.  Each character came straight from the Tyler Perry canon: the moral center (Madea) was the woman in gray; the troubled woman in need of Jesus was the woman in brown; the women in white were the embodiments of bad choices/consequences/karma; the righteous victims of circumstance, the women in blue and yellow; the fallen women were the two sisters in orange and purple; and then the been-there but-still-trying-to-get-it-right was the woman in green.  Oh, and the bitch was the woman in red.  And the righteous blue-collar brother was there too (dressed in navy blue), as was the professional man who creeps on the side (dressed in gray)...

While I could find flaws in each of the women, I have to focus my attention on the woman in red, portrayed by a very stiff Janet Jackson (the weakest link of the ensemble cast).  Not only was it the most unoriginal character in the film (because she was simply the black version of Miranda Priestly in "The Devil Wears Prada"), but she was so out of place that she appeared to be in another movie.  Am I the only person who found her totally unnecessary?  (Others have criticized Thandie Newton's performance as screechy, and well, I have to agree. But it worked for me...)

Finally, the most disappointing aspect of this film was the way in which Ntozake Shange, the genius who gave us this beautiful piece of work, was marginalized.  To string all of this together, her poetry was largely discarded, which might have been necessary in order to make room for Perry's narrative, but the result is a film that retains only the outline of the original choreopoem.  My favorite monologues were cut short or poorly edited to fit into the allotted scene ("Toussaint" being the most egregious cut of all).  And when the characters do recite from the original piece, it doesn't work.  Imagine a typical scene in any other Tyler Perry movie, then have one of the characters turn to the camera to recite a soliloquy from Shakespeare and you will get my point. 

Well, having said all of that, I give Tyler Perry a lot of credit for tackling this work.  I do not believe anyone else would have the balls to attempt such a drastic re-staging of this work, especially since there are so few women of color directing films these days.  Perry is a savvy businessman who knows that he needs to expand his audience, so by taking on a sacred feminist work like "colored girls", he pretty much knew that this would pay off.  Sure, he has taken a lot of heat for what is perceived to be his hated of black men, this play has never been about the men who wreak havoc on the lives of the women...this is about the women who have allowed these men into their lives.  Even if Perry had not directed this, a black female director would have received the same condemnation.

However, Perry is guilty of moralizing where the point was not to make moral assumptions about the characters.  Shange's intent was not to impose judgment on these women, but to highlight the choices that these women made in their own individual pursuits of happiness.  In his update, Perry punishes each woman for her moral failings--infidelity, infertility, rape, murder, terminal illness, physical deformity, mental depravity, psychosis...i.e., the wages of sin.

So, back to my original suggestions: read the original play, watch the PBS adaptation, and then watch this film and compare and contrast the three.  What you will discover is that Perry paid a respectful homage to a work that he clearly admired, but unfortunately, did not successfully adapt for 2010.  It is not a terrible movie, but it not great either.