Various thoughts:
Last night I watched the film that started my recent interest in Tyler Perry, Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor.
Not surprisingly, I enjoyed that one, too. I was most excited by the element that none of the liberal critics wanted to mention: the villain is clearly Satan. Yes, the HIV that the female lead gets is none other than the wages of sin.
The film is more a parable than a morality play, a fine distinction but Temptation is allegorical where a morality play isn't. There's even a scene in which the husband descends into Hell, in this case a nightclub, moving past sexy women who stroke his chest to find his wife drunk and probably high as one of several women lounging on the satanic figure. Not to mention that her mother calls him "The Devil" several times.
I've made a couple of theoretical defenses of Perry's films but I don't understand the general distaste for him. His films are fun even when they're completely serious like this one. Sure, there's a message, and it's not a subtle message, but so does every other film, in one way or another.
I guess I've answered my own question. The establishment media thinks they're giving the ultimate damnation when they call Perry's movies "corny." They are corny and neither Perry nor I think that's a bad thing.
If anything, he's rescuing corny movies from oblivion. Watching Leave it to Beaver or The Waltons today, we've got no point of relation. Those worlds are not only not connected to our world, they aren't even part of our semantic world--that is, the Great Depression is more alien to us than Alien. The suburban world of Beaver is now Desperate Housewives. Perry makes sentimental, moral movies that take place in a world with strip clubs, rape and HIV--our world and the world as we understand it. No wonder the "enlightened" hate him.
Temptation is the first non-Madea film I've watched and I had some trepidation about seeing it. I love the character of Madea; she hits me in a way that bypasses my brain and just makes me laugh.
From the outside, it appeared that Madea was just the old stereotype: a take-no-guff, sassy, moralistic old black lady. She's that but she's also a semi-reformed bad girl. The Madea sub-plot in Madea's Big Happy Family is that she doesn't know (or care) who the father of her adult daughter is. She creates criminal chaos and even goes to jail in, well, Madea Goes to Jail.
Big Happy Family is not the best film, even by the standards of the soap opera style Perry has, but it's a great example of what his movies are all about and a great example of what Madea can do. My favorite scene is a big, big throwback. Madea's single-time lover, Brown, the supposed father of her daughter Cora, has come from the hospital with the news that he's diabetic. Madea and her brother, Joe (also Perry), sling insult after insult at him. This scene is old vaudeville, like watching W.C. Fields throw barbs at a child.
But Big Happy Family's structure is a good example of the mechanical style that the critics don't like. As a mother tries to tell her family that she's got terminal cancer, her children are too wrapped up in their personal problems to hear the news. Madea is called in as an expert and, in the end, deus ex machina.
It's the least deft denouement in a series that isn't know for its deftness. After allowing the animosities between the family members to rise to the surface, Madea sits them down at the mother's funeral and proceeds to tell the secrets and home truths that make them understand and forgive one another. This allows for a comic--and too long--final scene in which Madea goes on Maury to find out Brown is not Cora's father and make the typical Maury scene.
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