No one has ever accused me of being an apologist for men. But I felt like one as I walked out of For Colored Girls. Men don’t get a fair shake in the movie; they are bashed and trashed from start to finish.
Of course this movie is not about them. It’s about a group of beautiful, tragic colored girls first brought to life in Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Her play, first staged in 1974, was part of a flowering of black women’s literature that included the books The Color Purple, The Women of Brewster Place and The Bluest Eye. For many of us, too, it was the first time African American women’s tongues had come untied.
It was also the first time that women writers aired the dirty laundry about sexism, violence and abuse suffered at the hands of black men, our brothers and lovers in the struggle. Misogyny had been a well-kept family secret. Michele Wallace turned the dogs loose in 1979 with in her groundbreaking book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, which took a long, hard look at male privilege in the black power movement.
For Colored Girls was part of that collective exhale, a Greek chorus of truth telling. Colored girls all over the country could recite the poetry of the play—“somebody almost ran off wit alla my stuff.” And, about that plant, “you may water it your damn self.”
But that was then and this is now. The sins of the black man have been on the spin cycle for years and need no more public airing. The simplistic version is old news. It goes like this: All men are dogs and there aren’t enough of them. A community conversation about black male-female relationships should be continued, but in a thoughtful, nuanced, textured way.
There is little texture in Tyler Perry’s version of For Colored Girls.” It offers a straight-up good vs. evil portrayal of the battle of the black sexes without adding to the healing. For Colored Girls, at least Perry’s version, has not stood the test of time. What felt revolutionary in the 1970s now seems like piling on.
Surprising, too, that men are treated so poorly in a Tyler Perry production. He generally does well by men. While lots of Perry’s men do bad all by themselves, many others are too good to be true. They are church-going brothers; in a typical Tyler Perry movie, a Sunday morning church congregation looks like the bleachers at a Knicks game. Characters like Monty, played by Idris Elba in Perry’s Daddy’s Little Girls, are hard-working guys who take care of, yes, their “daddy’s little girls.” In the Why Did I Get Married movies, Perry sheds the Madea drag and stars as a good-guy pediatrician, caring father and understanding husband who forgives his wife when she comes this close to cheating on him.
When the ubiquitous Mr. Perry said he was signing on to write and direct the iconic For Colored Girls, the black intelligentsia screamed and hollered like they had invented misery. How had the iconic black feminist fever dream ended up in the hands of the cross-dressing, modern-day chitlin circuit director?
But once the cast signed on, the black literati snapped their mouths shut. Whoopi, Janet, Phylicia, Thandie, Loretta Devine, Kerry Washington, Anika Noni Rose, Kimberly Elise. Awright now; let’s give Mr. Perry and his A-list cast a chance and let him build his serious film cred.
So what happened? In the movie, Perry sticks close to the poetic, womanist script. And he directs the actresses who play the powerful, tragic characters into the full-grown, fully realized women that set the stage on fire in Shange’s play.
But not the men. The male characters who victimize these women are portrayed, with little exception, as he-Devils. The date rapist, the downlow guy and the old dog who cheats get no back story. They are strictly cardboard characters. Perry could’ve saved money by casting the creepy mannequins from the Old Navy commercials rather than flesh and blood actors. Only Michael Ealy’s Beau Willie is allowed to talk about the war that ruined him. And Donald, the police officer and good husband played by Hill Harper, gets no villain treatment but also no back-story.
Certainly plenty of movies aim at the lowest common denominator, reducing black women to shrill stereotypes—the gold-digger, the angry black woman, the last mama on the couch, Madea. But that doesn’t make it right.
Tyler Perry pushed his film’s setting ahead 40 years to modern day. He also added two colored ladies to Shange’s line-up and tweaked characters such as Janet Jackson’s Type-AAA magazine editor. If he had the guts to make these changes, why not take it a step further?
Go ahead and let the women have their say—albeit fewer of them to prevent the movie from spilling into The English Patient-length. But flesh out the men and their stories. Hire somebody (calling Jay-Z?) to rewrite poetry for them. Give our audience a look into the shame, stigma and homophobia that would push a black man down low. Show us how the extreme emotional and physical violence of war would drive a man to beat his woman and kill his kids.
Giving the men’s stories maybe not equal, but at least fair treatment, would make for a better movie. One that we could love. Fiercely.
Photo of Tyler Perry at 2010 Academy Awards from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
This is a really thought-provoking review of FCG, which I watched over the weekend. My feelings are quite mixed: on the one hand, when Shange's poetry flowed, it really soared (the recitations of "Sorry," "Abortion Cycle," and "One" were standouts). On the other hand, when it switched into Perry's own dialogue, he couldn't reach the same heights.
The rape scene is still haunting me! And it's very easy to interpret the movie as yet another "black male-bashing" movie. But what I find especially curious about this re-imagining of Shange's choreopoem is how Perry, as Mako Fitts mentioned in her own review, really does use black women's voices and bodies to address his many issues.
Not only are the black men reduced to cardboard characters, but their bodies are subjected to quite a homoerotic gaze (not going to say anymore about the director's sexuality here), not to mention the only black male character who comes the closest to having a monologue waxing poetic about his own issues, conflicts, and desires is the down-low brother. Projection much?
I almost wished Perry kept the artistic, experimental aspect of the original stage play, in which the men had no dialogue, and simply presented the "male" characters in shadow, so they resembled ghosts. That way, we have no real flesh-like characters to interpret through one-dimensionality. We would recognize that this story is solely from the "colored girls," and from their own perspective.
I'm not sure I want to champion that we create some kind of "equal space" for the battle of the sexes. That's someone else's story, not Shange's! The choreopoem is what it is: it came out of Bay Area's Women's Bar scene for crying out loud!
When men have their own drama (think Fight Club, Social Network, Boyz n the Hood, Hurt Locker), women are rarely included and are done so in cardboard-cut-out ways. Funny, though, we never seem to have a problem with boyz-only drama (lest it's ridiculously and blatantly chauvinistic, like with The Social Network, for example).
That said, kudos to Thandie Newton, who made a 2-dimensional "wild girl" (aka "lady in orange") much more 3-dimensional than Perry's own conservative-based religious worldview would have her be, and to Kimberly Elise, who sent shivers up my spine with the last words: "I found god in myself & I loved her FIERCELY!"
When can we talk about the black women who WERE represented and how, when black men like Perry hijack black feminism without fully understanding this worldview, it's the incredible work of black actresses who bring it back to the rope?
I am really disappointed in Linda Villarosa;s review. The play and the movie are not about Black men but about Black women and their relationships. The movie in Perry's hands was at times soaring especially when he just let Shange's words speak. The choppy editing, the less than nuanced cinematography (with rare exception) was a distraction at best. I agree with the @janell… that Perry's own or at least cinematic conservative Christian beliefs often times get in the way. While I thought Thandie Newton was fabulous, her character was oftentimes punished for her brash sexuality – unlike in the book where Shange gave her a more self-empowered portrayal. Yes, she was a victim but she was also someone who took control of her sexuality and found her needs and joy in being sexual -she was not a slut or a prostitute regardless of what the men she bed or a nebbie neighbor (again, a moral signifier from the brain of Perry) thought of her behavior.
For Colored Gay Boys Who Have Considered Suicide While Sitting Amidst A Homophobic Audience Watching For Colored Girls.
"Kill that faggot girl," "Those fucking faggots." "I hate gay men."
I heard it all.
I completely agree with Janelle's post above. And I find it so aggravating that whenever women step away from our "supportive role" to reveal who the men in our lives are, whether in love, work or politics, some people -including apparently Linda Villarosa – feel compelled to chastise us. A pendulum must swing before it can center itself. Men – ALL men – have more privilege than women. Rare enough to be heard in Hollywood, even in this flawed director's vision; the project would never have been given to a woman director.
I thought the movie was phenomenal and I'm so over the men and women crying about men's roles in a movie for colored girls. How was Perry supposed to spin a RAPIST or an ABUSER in a positive light? Men dominate everything in society, including film. Why can't they just let us have a movie. All the negativity from men has overshadowed the women's stories.
Intriguing perspective. Not sure I agree that the men needed balance. This is for colored GIRLS. The down-low storyline was very lazy and ill-formed but other than that, the male characters were acceptable. What did need to happen was more poetry. it's interesting to note which poems Tyler removed and the downtrodden angle he chose to take. We all know Tyler is not a filmmaker. He is a chitlin playwright that hit it big. We should not be expecting epic cinematography or amazing dialogue. Which is why, in the case of For Colored Girls I surely wish he would have just bankrolled and "presented" it. NOT attempted to write and direct. But since he did, I wish he would have at least highlighted the 'Colors' and that he would have changed the back alley abortion to a modern-day, free clinic one and focus on the pain of the act of abortion or itself, or the pain of having any OTHER reason besides personal choice to have one performed, although Theresa Thompson was excellent when reciting the Purple words… ALL the actresses were PHENOMENAL (with the exception of Janet, but she was indeed adequate.). Phylicia, Anika, Loretta? AWESOME. And I am glad they got top billing and I pray they are nominated come awards season. Overall I'm sure this will bring more good than harm to future black art in Hollywood. Hate it or love it, Tyler is proving to distributors that we can rock the box office to the tune of millions with all-black stories and a black director at the helm. His financial success will no doubt cause other films of better quality to be highlighted. On For Colored Girls, I will have to side with Ntozake. She has been reported as being please with the film although she describes it as incomplete, and she is back on the best seller list with legions of people unfamiliar with the work scrambling to get it. There is also talk of a broadway revival of the piece. I can't argue with that.
Im not sure that I agree with your views. The movie was supposed to be strictly based on the lives of these women. If a rapist , cheater and down low brother was not portrayed in a in depth view, I dont think the audience really cared. Of course, they are people too, but this was really not supposed to be about the man's perspective. I also believe that you need to be able to deicepher how art IMITATES life. If you are able to seperate entertainment from reality , I am sure that lots of people no not all African American men are dirty dogs. Yet, this artform is able to raise awareness on many taboo topics that most women would be afraid to speak up about,