Diahann Carroll and Malcolm Barrett are part of the wacky goings-on in “Peeples.”
Diahann Carroll and Malcolm Barrett are part of the wacky goings-on in “Peeples.” (
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So my dream came true. Craig Robinson, one of the funniest comic actors working, finally got to be the leading man in a movie . . . produced by Tyler Perry. Give it up for Satan, always with the clever catch hidden in the fine print.
Robinson — Darryl on “The Office,” with memorable roles in “Eastbound & Down,” “Hot Tub Time Machine” and “Knocked Up” — may be incapable of not being funny. I’d pay to see him read the stock tables. Also, “Peeples,” which is written and directed by Tina Gordon Chism (who wrote “ATL” and “Drumline”), isn’t really a Perry movie. It’s a good-natured broad comedy, episodic and sitcom-ish (without Perry’s trademark soapiness). It’s also largely without a plot, which gives it the sense of a 30-minute situation stretched way too far.
Still, I laughed a few times, mostly at Robinson’s typically engaging Everyman turn as Wade Walker, a charming but only semi-successful New Yorker. He does musical-
comedy numbers for little kids, advising them not to pee themselves: “Speak it, don’t leak it,” goes a musical number that appears three times in the movie, at least a couple of times too many.
Wade’s posh lawyer girlfriend Grace Peeples (Kerry Washington) lives with him but hasn’t even mentioned his existence to her distinguished family and its domineering dad, Judge Peeples (David Alan Grier). Wade is hurt: “I’m not making sweet precious love to you until you share the chocolate Kennedys.”
Nevertheless, she slips away to her rich parents’ Sag Harbor mansion without inviting him, but he pops up anyway, nearly getting humped by the family dog and bringing wine because he doesn’t know that his prospective mother-in-law (S. Epatha Merkerson) is an alcoholic.
The class tension between Wade and Grace has the potential to be more interesting than it is ever allowed to become in the film; if she were really bothered by his humble job, would she be living with him in the first place? Moreover, shouldn’t she be a little more upset that he essentially crashes the party at her parents’ house? You’d think that move would be grounds for breakup, or at least a fight.
Moreover, Robinson spends too much of the picture reacting to other people being funny. He does lots of double-takes at the wacky goings-on in the house, where the teen son (Tyler James Williams) is a genius kleptomaniac, Grace’s CNN broadcaster sister (Kali Hawk) hasn’t told the family she’s a lesbian (though she did bring her girlfriend) and even buttoned-up Dad has a secret life that involves midnight skinny-dipping with hippies. But Washington is a bore in a bland role. Lost for something funny to do, she finally puts on a too-small schoolgirl outfit. The script throws in one random contrivance after another without ever becoming explosive enough to qualify as farce.
But Robinson’s appeal holds the movie together. He’s game for anything — riding a giant tricycle, engaging in an endurance contest with the judge inside a sweat lodge and accidentally getting high on ’shrooms during a town re-enactment of “Moby-Dick” that the movie seems to think is automatically a really funny idea. (Not necessarily.)
Chism’s characters are pleasingly odd, and though she can’t string much of a narrative together — there is a stop-and-start quality to the picture that grows tiresome — a few of the set pieces are funny, especially when Wade’s brother (Malcolm Barrett), a doll surgeon, shows up to make things slightly crazier.
Robinson deserves a movie that’s polished where this one is haphazard, but he needs to be able to cut loose instead of being reduced to the confusion and blanching he is often called upon to do in this one. How about a buddy movie with his old “Office”-mate Steve Carell?