Rainbows Have Nothing to Hide: FOR COLORED GIRLS

I’ve never been a fan of Tyler Perry, mostly because film after film showed he had promise that he was failing to fully realize. Instead, he spent his time making films that fit safely within what his base of audience members already wanted to see. (He was essentially becoming a new Kevin Smith). I very nearly liked a handful of his titles (for my money, his Family That Preys barely missed its chance to be a camp classic), but with each new release it was frustrating to see him gather up a collection of great, and otherwise underutilized, African American actresses and put them to use in plots of overstuffed and sloppy, anything-goes comic melodrama that gave bad names to both comedy and melodrama. The worst involved his own drag portrayals of a sassy grandma named Madea.

But I’m glad such underwhelming critical and overwhelming financial success has paved the way for his latest film, For Colored Girls, a go-for-broke adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s acclaimed experimental choreopoem play from 1975, For Colored Girl Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Perry’s freely adapted, tonally brave film is just strange enough, just intense enough, and just enough of a leap forward in showing off his filmmaking talents that it could never have been made under a conventional studio deal. Instead, his personal fortune and own production company had put him in the perfect spot to take a large risk. I’m glad he did. This was a risk worth taking, rewarding him with a film that at long last marks his arrival as a talent to watch.

This is not a perfect film, but it’s a vital one that shakes about with a messy power. It gives riveting showcases to a collection of outstanding actresses. Perry’s more daring with his camera. There are moments in the film when I realized that he had been holding the camera on a close-up of an actress, letting her character speak her mind in one unbroken take. That’s when Shange’s text shines through, in these moments when a character will stop and speak elegantly and fluidly about her innermost feelings and about her tragic situation.

And tragic is precisely true. The women in this film struggle with child abuse, rape, infidelity, infertility, disease, spousal abuse, murder, and more. Perry not only regards these tragedies; he gets deep under the skins of his characters. This is a film that aches with sympathy for these women. It moves and bleeds with their emotions. The characters live interwoven lives that cross paths around one apartment building with a tough but caring supervisor (Phylicia Rashad). There’s a woman (Kimberly Elise) with two kids from an abusive boyfriend. There’s a compassionate dance instructor (Anika Noni Rose) who is just starting a romantic relationship. There’s a community center worker (Loretta Devine) who has an on-again-off-again relationship with an unfaithful ex. There’s a deeply religious woman (Whoopi Goldberg) with two dissimilar daughters (Thandie Newton and Tessa Thompson). There’s a caring social worker (Kerry Washington) who finds she can’t get pregnant. And there’s a successful businesswoman (Janet Jackson) who thinks she’s escaped her background but remains connected to it in ways that she can’t yet see.

Rather than a pile up of character and incident, the film has a riveting tension to it that comes from a thrilling sense of emotion and empathy. In ways that sometimes seem too simplistic and other times too over-the-top, Perry guides these women’s stories to deeply moving territory and back again with no camp, and no winking. This is earnest, deeply felt filmmaking. I’m glad he’s experimenting, even if I couldn’t always parse out the complexity (or is that messiness?) of what he’s trying to say. A sequence that crosscuts between one woman who is being date-raped and another woman suspecting her husband of infidelity is great filmmaking but muddled messaging. The moments individually have tremendous power, but Perry seems to be drawing a link between the two types of betrayal. (I hope he doesn’t think infidelity and rape are comparable crimes). Nonetheless, it seems to feed into the larger theme of shared pain within these women’s lives, even if it’s a theme that is at times inelegantly expressed.

What’s most thrilling about the film is the way Perry respects his actresses and discovers ways to use his camera to not just record, but express and augment performance. He frames Jackson in her posh apartment with walls and doorways forming cold, clean squares; she’s literally boxed herself away from emotional connection. Here and elsewhere within the film, he lets characters slip out the sides of the frame while conversing with each other. He pushes in on close-ups and pulls away to shift a close-up into a two shot. This is not, like any other Perry production, a film that sits idly by, casually collecting the surface of the story. Here Perry is utilizing his camera to get into his story, to explore his characters’ traumas in specific cinematic ways. As messy and muddled as it can get, it never feels less than alive. Even if it never quite feels like a cohesive whole, it feels emotionally full. It’s a fantastic, colorful piece of melodrama with deeply felt performances movingly captured.

The Sky is Falling! And the Seas! And the Mountains! And theaaah!

Back in the 1970s, when Irwin Allen was the master of disaster, filmmakers regularly trotted out the same old creaky tropes by grouping together a hodgepodge of celebrities, of varying renown and talent, and then throwing them in harm’s way. The formula didn’t always work, but it did work often enough for moviemakers to keep trying. Allen produced two of the best examples of the disaster film with these tropes: the capsized-ship story The Poseidon Adventure, and, my favorite, the burning skyscraper story The Towering Inferno. Those two films are prime examples of expertly crafted cheese and the reasons that I have such a goofy affection for the entire disaster movie genre. I love the way the varied cast members interact amidst the effects, especially Inferno’s parallel plotlines starring Paul Newman and Steve McQueen that build to the inevitable meeting of these two very cool men. To this day, I get excited when I see one of those posters with the line of little portraits revealing the cast in peril.

Since the mid-1990s Roland Emmerich has been making big-budget explosion films that are mostly of the disaster persuasion, staking out a corner of contemporary cinema that looks an awful lot like Allen’s 70s pad. But Emmerich has been wildly inconsistent. There’s the passable Independence Day (1996), which, despite its exploding landmarks, is actually more of an alien-invasion movie. He followed that with Godzilla (1998), a horrible half-hearted movie. But somewhere around the middle of this decade, Emmerich went full-disaster with The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a flawed but enjoyable popcorn flick that found weather raining down destruction on New England (elsewhere too, but our ensemble is exclusively East Coast). Now, with 2012, Emmerich has used a misreading of the Mayan calendar as the jumping point to top all of his movies, and all disaster movies, in premise, not always in quality. He exploits the same kind of whiplash-inducing “thousands are dying, but save the dog!” mentality that has long served peddlers of schlock well, and here it is done very well. Forget escaping a boat. Forget putting out the fire. Forget staying warm. There’s nowhere to run when the whole world is coming to an end. (But don’t worry too much; some of the cast will still have a happy ending).

Speaking of the cast, it’s an odd mix that’s suitably eclectic, with two very likable actors, John Cusack and Chiwetel Ejiofor, as a sci-fi writer and a scientist, respectively, doing most of the earnest heavy-lifting. (It’s nice to think that someone, somewhere, might think Cusack and Ejiofor could be our Newman and McQueen). Ultimately we need to think that the problems of the small ensemble cast do amount to at least a hill of beans on this hemorrhaging planet and Emmerich was lucky enough to get an ensemble that would work hard to elevate the horrendous dialogue that he co-wrote with his composer, Harold Kloser. There’s Amanda Peet, as Cusack’s ex, and Tom McCarthy as her new man. There’s Danny Glover as the U.S. president and Thandie Newton as his daughter. There’s Woody Harrelson as a kooky conspiracy-nut and Oliver Platt as a slimy bureaucrat. There's also some cute child actors and a little dog. Even George Segal shows up in an extraneous subplot, but then again, anything that isn’t a crumbling landmark is sort of extraneous.

Let’s get back to the disasters. Earthquakes! Volcanoes! Tidal waves! There’s nothing but destruction happening here and it’s played out with incredible special-effects that are sometimes scary, sometimes silly, but always enjoyable. Emmerich has perfected a kind of industrial-strength filmmaking here in an entertaining blend of silliness and suspense from the ominous title card to the perfect deep-fried cheese that is the end-credit-caterwauling of Adam Lambert. Other than a lame half-hearted nod towards a social conscience, the movie proceeds with a determined desire to let us marvel at the effects, to let us revel in his amiably dumb light-and-sound show. I was never bored, occasionally thrilled, and often amused. Emmerich finds a good spot between camp and cool and rides it for two-and-a-half hours.