Tyler Perry’s ninth film as a writer-director, “For Colored Girls,” represents something of an improvement over his last opus screened for critics, 2006’s “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.” And not just because the cross-dressing auteur’s signature character, the raving granny Madea, is mercifully absent.
Perry is adapting someone else’s work for once: Ntozake Shange’s landmark “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” a 1974 “choreo-poem” about the woes in black women’s lives that has been frequently performed on stage since winning Obie and Tony awards.
Shange’s words retain their power despite the melodramatic incidents Perry has woven to fill in the spaces between poems, his flat, TV-style direction and the highly variable performances of an all-star cast. Their stories crisscross until almost all of them meet for a literal group hug that could almost have doubled as the film’s wrap party.
Kimberly Elise, whose fine performance in “Mad Black Woman” was upstaged by Madea’s antics, has the only fully developed character — Crystal, the abused girlfriend of an alcoholic war veteran (Michael Ealy) who also poses a clear and present danger to their two young children.
Crystal lives in a Harlem apartment building with several of the other women, including a promiscuous bartender (Thandie Newton) with a younger sister (Tessa Thompson). The latter is a dancer who loses her virginity and is forced to seek the services of an abortionist (though the story is ostensibly set in the present) scarily played by Macy Gray. A scenery-chewing Whoopi Goldberg goes way over the top as the sisters’ religious fanatic mother.
Even worse is the campy Janet Jackson as Crystal’s boss, an icy magazine editor whose hunky hubby (Omari Hardwick) is sleeping with men on the down low — because, it’s implied, she’s so emasculating.
Somewhere in the middle are Phylicia Rashad as the building’s manager and resident Greek chorus, Loretta Devine as a bubbly relationship counselor with an on/off lover, Anika Noni Rose as a date-raped dance instructor and Kerry Washington as a child welfare worker with fertility problems.
“For Colored Girls” begs the inevitable comparison with “Precious,” a vastly superior Harlem-set tale of misery that Perry and his sister-in-victimhood Oprah Winfrey attached their names to.
“Precious” worked partly because it did not wrap its sordid tale in Christian uplift and dime-store psychology — elements that have made Tyler Perry a rich filmmaker but have turned “For Colored Girls” shrill and manipulative.