Hey folks, Harry here... the trailer for this is pretty dreadful looking. I had no desire at all to check it out, and this review makes it sound like welding bare-eyed. NewGuy.. I'm sorry - sounds like you should've worn safety goggles. Here ya go...
DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN
Directed by Darren Grant
Preaching To the Choir
Often times the story behind the making of a film is more interesting than the end result. This is certainly the case with playwright turned filmmaker Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman. According to his website bio, Mr. Perry, within a six-year span, went from being homeless to becoming “America’s most successful young playwright, grossing $75,000,000 in box office with seven productions.” Even after enduring many failures in the theater during his first several years, Perry “continued to hold onto his faith in God and to the belief that one day it would all come out alright.” I haven’t seen any of Perry’s Christian-themed stage productions, but if Diary of a Mad Black Woman is exemplary of his talent, then his phenomenal success can only be attributed to divine intervention. The fact that such a treacly, cliché-ridden screenplay could be produced into a film that will probably- based upon his built-in audience- be successful, is nothing short of a miracle for Perry.
With its swelling sappy, score and glamorously dressed extras, Diary of a Mad Black Woman kicks off like one of those 1980’s made-for-TV melodramas. But instead of Joan Collins we get Kimberly Elise (The Manchurian Candidate) as Helen, the devoted wife of successful Atlanta-based attorney, Charles (Steve Harris). Rather than seduce us with scenes of their picture-perfect marriage before dropping the inevitable oh-no-he-didn’t bomb, Helen spells it out for us right away in her first of many voice-over diary entries: “You’d think our lives were perfect, but looks can be deceiving.” Unfortunately, this type of trite, on-the-nose dialogue extends to the rest of the characters. In good dramatic writing, the truth is rarely spoken – but revealed through behavior. In Diary of a Mad Black Woman, everyone says exactly what’s on their mind, badly.
When Charles (after leaving her for another woman) literally tosses his wife out of their mansion, the scene is so ridiculously over-the-top, I was half expecting Ashton Kutcher to pop out of the bushes to inform poor Helen she’d been punk’d. With nowhere to go, Helen ends up on the doorstep of her sassy, gun-toting grandma Madea (played by Mr. Perry himself, unconvincingly), and develops a very chaste romance with corn-rowed hunk, Orlando (Shemar Moore). The actors tackle their roles with earnestness and enthusiasm, but they often seem as confused about their characters motivations as we are; the result being like a bunch of eager fifth graders trying to put on a school play directed by the phys ed teacher. When Orlando tells Helen that she’s a beautiful black woman, she responds with, “Is that all you see, a beautiful black woman?” I don’t know about Orlando, but that’s all I saw.
Screenwriter Perry and director Darren Grant are so intent on entertaining such a diverse demographic, Diary of a Mad Black Woman renders itself completely tone-deaf. It’s a flavorless stew of Lifetime movie, Big Mama’s House, Nutty Professor II, Love Jones, New Jack City and, most oddly, The Burning Bed. I won’t dare give away the Big Twist – it’s the movie’s only good laugh.
Faith, however well intended, isn’t enough to compensate for poor filmmaking. Director Mel Gibson originally planned to release The Passion of The Christ without translating its dialogue of ancient languages (Hebrew, Latin, Aramaic). In an effort to reach a larger audience, Mr. Gibson in the end opted to give his film subtitles; but The Passion is so visual, so cinematic, that even if we couldn’t understand what the characters were saying, none of the film’s dramatic power would have been lost. While their respective approaches to bringing religion to screen couldn’t be divergent, Perry should take a lesson in cinematic storytelling from Gibson. Diary of a Mad Black Woman wasn’t adapted from the stage; it was merely photographed. The film is so image-illiterate that I closed my eyes for twenty minutes during the terminally boring second act, and I was able to follow the story quite easily (if you insist on seeing the film, I wouldn’t recommend performing this experiment unless you don’t mind dozing off). I had a chuckle when one character says to another, “I see you still have that picture of us.” I didn’t even have to open my eyes to see the photograph! It’s like a bad radio drama, except louder. With its tell-don’t-show technique and simplistic moralizing, Diary of a Mad Black Woman isn’t a film; it’s a sermon.
The NewGuy
