Let us assume directors (the auteur ones) constantly evolve, and create for themselves new artistic challenges. This goes for the greats as well as the crummy ones, which is why Uwe Boll movies are now merely absolutely wretched instead of soul-rottingly, apocalyptically cataclysmic. In the case of Boll, who’ll never be within a continent of good, this makes his movies less fun, for they lose their flavor. It’s kind of the same thing with Tyler Perry.
Now, I don’t intend to examine directors as such; our focus is franchises. It just so happens that the Madea Simmons franchise is the product of a single writer-director-producer-actor-playwright-visionary. As the recurring Madea character is simply one aspect of his larger personal quest, Perry’s own aim (one presumes) is not to rely solely upon his beloved Madea, but avoid stagnation and move beyond her. And Perry did just that following Madea’s Family Reunion, releasing two 2007 pictures (Daddy’s Little Girls and Why Did I Get Married?) which aren’t only completely Madea-free, a whole one of ‘em isn’t even an adaptation of one of Perry’s plays. I did not watch these.
Here the hope is that Perry can find commercial (and artistic?) success. In that, he’s been triumphant, with each movie doing about as well as the one before – enough that without familiarity with his oeuvre, they surely all blur together. Artistically…who’s to say? Glancing ahead at Perry’s résumé suggests he cannot move beyond play adaptations, Madea or no, which is kind of disappointing.
Play adaptations like Meet the Browns. Of courses any Tyler Perry joint covered here is likely to be an adaptation, for that’s from whence Madea emerged. So by definition we’re looking at possibly some of Perry’s less exceptional film work. But here’s the thing: “Meet the Browns,” the play, it doesn’t even have Madea in it. Nor does “What’s Done in the Dark,” from which Perry actually pilfers most of his plot (the film’s production is so close to that of “What’s Done in the Dark” that this was likely a single macro-project for Perry).
Indeed, 98% of Meet the Browns seems equivalent to those parts of the Perry Saga we’ve skipped over. Madea only appears right before the end, with under three minutes screen time. Still, that let’s ‘em get Madea featured in all the trailers, like Vin Diesel’s cameo in Tokyo Drift. This is the danger of defining a franchise by a character alone. We’re but one step away from calling Wayne’s World in continuity with Terminator 2, simply because the T-1000 is in both of them.
For my purposes, there then isn’t a lot of Meet the Browns I have to examine. Here’s all of it: Madea and her brother Joe (both Tyler Perry in his beloved fat suit) engage the police in a high speed pursuit. Madea is arrested.
Forsooth, this is but a preview for the later Madea Goes to Jail (with the Madea-less non-adaptation The Family That Preys falling in between). If this were just slapped on the end, I’d call it an embedded preview, such as that for Back to the Future Part III within Back to the Future Part II. Twere that so, this’d arguably not belong to the franchise. But that’s not the case! Madea’s arrest is integrated into the larger focus of Meet the Browns. Supporting characters watch it on TV – this is some pretty meager integration, and if Perry were a Spike Lee type, I’d almost say it was a veiled critique of race relations or some old thing. And so it has no – and I mean N-O – connection to anything else in this movie. It’s mostly just a cheap ploy, a way to maximize theatrical butts among those faithful solely to Madea (like me). Add to that a minor character’s throwaway admission an hour that she is Madea’s illegitimate daughter, and that’s it.
For the Meet the Browns audience not completely immersed in the greater Madea legendarium, this moment must seem thoroughly without precedent. It’d be totally random, pointless and left field.
At this stage, I’m not beholden to consider the rest of Meet the Browns…but I’ll do so anyway. Though most briefly. Because it largely answers the question of Perry’s directorial evolution.
Sort of surprisingly, it seems Perry has learned from some of his old artistic criticisms. Meet the Browns, while still a comic melodrama with an uneven tone, isn’t as egregious in its exaggeration, arch characters or artificial plot devices as, say, Diary of a Mad Black Woman. And therein lies its problems. Perry has removed many of his faults, but he hasn’t replaced them with anything new. And those faults were genuine products of his unwieldy passion. With a little more technical competence, but his own voice neutered, Perry delivers a mediocrity, something so mediocre it once resided on the IMDb Bottom 100. This is Perry’s Cop Out – hackwork from a guy who really shouldn’t be competing with the barely-there journeymen who make up Hollywood’s lowest barrel, simply because he’s more unique than that.
Perry knows only one form of story – not a problem; many an auteur is similar – and that story suffers from undernourishment. Thus again we’ve an older, self-sufficient black woman with kids – Brenda Brown (Angela Bassett, who is on paper the absolute best actress for parts like this). She suffers adversity, but this time there’s really no eeeeevil businessman suitor to contend with. Instead, she’s just out of a job and support her family. Cue the weeping. Then there’s the usual GOOD MAN to romance her for no reason, again played by Shemar Moore, recognizable enough now they don’t even give him a credit…Oh, no, wait, my bad, that’s actually lookalike Rick Fox. That explains why he plays a basketball player. But boy, Tyler Perry sure has a type when it comes to his bromance man-crushes!
Each Perry pic I’ve pondered seems to feature less conflict than the one before…possibly because that conflict is often so awkwardly unrealistic and wedged-in. So the sole conflict of Meet the Browns is Brenda’s inability to trust Harry (that’s the guy Rick Fox plays), because no man can be that GOOD of a MAN. When this hang-up appeared in Madea’s Family Reunion, it was dinky enough, but seeing it essentially stretched out to feature length doesn’t help matters. “You’re perfect! You can’t be perfect! Therefore I hate you! No, wait, you ARE actually perfect! I love you! Mmm-hmm!” So we’re just waiting for outside circumstances to conspire at the end to reveal Harry’s perfection to Brenda, so she knows he’s a GOOD MAN.
By the way, Brenda is one conactive heroine (um…what’s the antonym for “proactive?”). She does nothing to resolve her own movie, simply letting a loving god named Tyler Perry work things out for her.
Otherwise, Meet the Browns is just panoplies of subplots, not having anything to do with each other. For one thing, there’s the Browns – yeah, again somehow Perry’s titular characters are supporting buffoons, barely in their own movie. They live in Georgia, are fat, and are grotesque caricatures of outdated black stereotypes, played without irony. So basically the Browns are Madea, only younger, and performed by less motivated actors – David Mann, Jenifer Lewis, Margaret Avery, Frankie Faison.
Another subplot, which starts, transpires, then stops completely in isolation of any other plot development…Michael (Perry regular Lance Gross), Brenda’s high-school-aged 27-year-old son, decides one night to deal drugs. He gets shot in the back. One montage later, he’s completely healed from his injuries, then resumes his former basketball plotline with Harry as though nothing had ever happened.
With the plot progressing in this manner (and to call this one of Perry’s sturdier plots is to say something), it’s actually not too odd for Madea to drop in for a glorified cameo/preview.
I’m calling it quits ahead of schedule on Meet the Browns, not because I haven’t anything else to say, but because it won’t be pertinent to our Madea-centric exploration. So I’ll just let the remaining images spool out in silence…
…Oh! One more thing! “Meet the Browns” (aka “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns”) is also a television series on TBS. It is a spinoff of the movie, partly, of the mostly unmined stageplay, partly, and also of some supporting characters from Perry’s other TV sitcom, “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne” – a show where certain Browns film actors play non-Browns characters alongside a different roster of Browns. Yes, there’s a strange, free-flowing continuity anarchy between Perry’s different media. And that’s without even addressing another TV spinoff the madman has in mind, the proposed “Floyd’s Family.”
Things are getting out of hand!
RELATED POSTS:
• No. 1 Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005)
• No. 2 Madea's Family Reunion (2006)
• No. 4 Madea Goes to Jail (2009)
• No. 5 I Can Do Bad All By Myself (2010)
• No. 6 Madea's Big Happy Family (2011)
No comments:
Post a Comment