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If you haven't seen the movie, I can say the critics got it right. It's a whole lotta mess: anachronistic, unbelievable, over the top, basically like any other Tyler Perry production. But there are moments, moments where seasoned actors stretch beyond the limitations of the director and a disjointed script to make magic. Can there be an Oscar for colored girls who do the damn thing in a Tyler Perry film when the writing is not enuf? Kimberly Elise FTW and Macy Gray was fire too. And I love me some Anika Noni Rose, even though I always feel like she's doing the big drama of stage when she's on the screen (worked nicely though for the choreopoem). In spite of some fabulous performances, For Colored Girls completely misses the original's tone and message. From Shange's work we get themes of self-love, pleasure, hurt and healing, decentering men in our lives, etc. Tyler's framing leaves us with the exact opposite understandings; sex leads to pain, pay more attention to the men in your lives, know your role, and don't forget you are some how responsible for whatever misery life brings you.
*spoiler alert*
What I really want to talk about is Tyler's obsession with men who have sex with men. I mean in every film there is always some plot point or dialog that includes a man who looks like he just walked off the set of Noah's Arc talking about how gay he isn't. In this film, Janet Jackson, channeling Meryl Streep a la Devil Wears Prada, has a cough (people with HIV cough faintly, didn't you know?) and a husband who in one of the first scenes is literally caught with his pants down receiving oral sex from a man. Carl is a stock broker who is so emasculated by his wife that he needs to get his submission elsewhere. "Walking down the street holding hands with a man, that's gay!" he says in total disgust before he goes on to admit to having sex with men.
Though this plot point was apparently penned by Shange herself in her new edition of the text, this scene felt like a window into Tyler Perry's and a lot of ostensibly straight men's hearts. Showing genuine affection for another man is a sin but having sex with a man to reclaim your masculinity after being emasculated by women who don't know their role is another story. There's no discussion of Carl's desire here. Bitchy black women are not only responsible for rape (how couldn't she see the signs that we so clearly see as the audience?), their children being thrown out of windows (if she'd just left him earlier it couldn't have happened) they are also the reason that black men must "bend" turn to each other for sex. In other words, black men have sex with men because black women won't play their position, which is one of submission.
The film leaves you with a sense that there's something these women should have done, could have done differently to prevent these things from happening to them. What was a choreopoem of colored girls self-redemption becomes a PSA on how black women need to make different choices to forestall the violence that befalls them. The men however are simply reacting to the poor choices made by these women and as such are never truly held accountable for their actions, a posthumous slap to the face and forlorn gaze from a prison cell notwithstanding.
Perry was able to squelch condemnation from the very organizations most able to raise constructive criticism regarding his simplistic narrative by providing an opportunity to screen the film in advance for their benefit. What could have been a powerful moment to add the complexity that Perry missed, instead became an opportunity for Tyler Perry Studios to ask us to spread the For Colored Girls gospel for them as we were implored to tell our friends to go see it opening weekend. A brief talk back that included not one criticism of the film left me feeling confused and disappointed. If these women warriors could (would) not bring much-needed nuance how would other audiences (with less contact with the realities the film attempts to portray) react?
Black people have some healing to do. Tyler in particular needs more than his plays, movies, and TV show to work through his boyhood traumas. Like Lauryn Hill's Unplugged album and subsequent performances, trying to work your sh*t out publicly in your art doesn't always provide the most liberatory frame through which to process. Self medicating through art may seem better than other more obvious self-destructive drugs of choice but when your own wounds keep you from acknowledging that you are capable of and culpable in inflicting others trauma begets more trauma and a vicious cycle is created (an important point we could have learned through the film itself).
Tyler's rage at the black women who didn't protect him comes through in every production he's been associated with and perhaps his desire to understand their neglect might be better directed in the service of telling his own story, a story of a brown boy who wasn't man enough for his father but man enough for the mother of a friend who molested him and the THREE men who did the same. What might it mean for Tyler to tell his own story such that Maurice Robinson, Anthony Flagg, Jamal Parris and Spencer LeGrande might have had a more receptive public to hear their truths? Tyler's hurt haunts For Colored Girls, muddling the intricate and multi-layered tapestry that Shange constructed, and leaving this colored girl with little recourse but to reach back for the rainbows of the original.
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