Jul. 15, 2009 - Issue #717: Edmonton Musicians Directory 2009

DVD Detective

Madea Goes to Jail

Diary of a savvy Black man: Tyler Perry's unique mix of melodrama and comedy speaks to a very specific audience

If you ignore his actual films themselves, Tyler Perry is probably the most interesting American filmmaker today. You could probably write a book on what his runaway success means about the African-American experience in the United States, but I'll try to summarize the major points. The most relevant information to begin with is that Perry is a southern, African-American playwright who found pretty huge success with a touring series of occasionally musical plays revolving around the world of Mabel "Madea" Simmons, a sass-talking black grandma—her nickname is evidently the southern Black equivalent of Nana/Baba—with a hair-trigger temper, played by Perry himself in Big Momma's House-level drag. Perry's franchise grew even bigger when he turned his plays into films: his breakthrough, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, was made for just over $5 million US and grossed 10 times that. His latest, Madea Goes to Jail, just released on DVD, made $90 million, and was the number one film in America its opening weekend.

The really interesting part is that Perry has achieved all this with absolutely no support from Hollywood—Lionsgate Films is his distributor, but he makes them entirely with his money, through Atlanta-based Tyler Perry Studios, America's largest independent film studio—and despite the fact critical reaction is tepid at absolute best. And I don't just mean actual critics, though they've hardly been kind: even his ratings on a site like IMDB rarely crack a five, this from a site that rates the Transformers sequel a fairly solid 6.5. Probably what that means, though, is that not a lot of black people use IMDB.

See, his trick is that he speaks—powerfully—to a market that's almost entirely ignored by the major entertainment companies: Christian, middle-class African-Americans (now might be a good time to point out that, despite their success, a Perry movie has never actually opened at an Edmonton theatre, and for that matter rarely makes much money at all beyond US borders). His films are a really sort of bizarre mixture of what I can only really call sassy Black comedy—that Martin Lawrence reference wasn't for nothing—and treacly Christian morality plays that are kind of stunning in their simple dichotomies. How exactly those fit together so seamlessly in some minds is slightly beyond me, but then these are very specifically, literally African-American films, a culture I don't exactly have a lot of touchstones in common with (it's worth pointing out, again, that this is one that basically has nothing in the way of pop-cultural exposure, neither as materialistic and rampantly testosterone-y as mainstream hip-hop nor as acerbically political as Spike Lee).

The combination is, if nothing else, pretty utterly unique. Mixture might not actually be the right word: it's not as though one informs the other or their sensibilities fuse. More accurately, broad comedy and moral melodrama are fused together, their separate parts as visible as different patches on a quilt. So, then, in Madea Goes to Jail, we get the basically unprecedented experience of a joke about a Hispanic serial killer offing 18 men—to Madea's amused approval—juxtaposed with some really serious, heavy-on-the-Jesus attempts to get a junkie-prostitute off the street. The two are offered up so blindly, the apparent contradictions so incredibly ignored, you start to wonder if Perry is actually literally schizophrenic, or at least if he bothers to read his scripts all the way through.

But that's just kind of the way of the movie. Its melodramatic side follows a young lawyer's (Derek Luke) attempts to save the aforementioned prostitute (The Cosby Show's—one of the few cultural precedents for Perry, though really not the same thing at all—Keshia Knight Pulliam) in the face of a comically (unintentionally, natch) callous fiancé. Like, as in, this woman is staring at her fiancé taking care of a junkie going through withdrawal—a junkie who is a childhood friend of her fiancé, also—and starts bitching about how he never pays that kind of attention to her(!!). Because, in Perry's world, bad people have to be entirely morally bankrupt, the fiancé will eventually doctor up charges and get the prostitute thrown in jail for 17 years.

The comedic side of things is taken up by Madea, whose vicious temper—she pulls what's evidently a machine gun on uninvited party guests and trashes a parking-spot-thief's car with a forklift, all of this presented with a kind of tee-hee-ain't-she-a-big-sassy-black-woman vibe—lands her in anger management with Dr. Phil (Oprah's another decent cultural precedent, though with a much wider appeal) and eventually the slammer. There's also a certain degree of comic relief due to her slightly dim-witted family, mostly in the form of Black pop-cultural references, winks at the fact Madea is actually a dude in drag and exhortations for Madea to go to church.

Despite the fact she's not a churchgoer, Madea does have a pretty unfailing sense of morality, which comes into full play in the relatively brief prison scenes, and is of the take-responsibility-for-yourself variety. That there seems to be the thread that joins the two halves together, and ultimately explains a big part of Perry's appeal to his particular audience: for a group that has pretty much literally worked its way from the ghetto to the suburbs, it's a pretty self-affirming message, though delivered a little too simply to transcend its intended target. V

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