For Colored Girls

Tyler Perry's big screen version of For Colored Girls (which he wrote, directed, and produced), now on DVD, brings the action up close and personal in a way no staged play can do. Right away that makes the experience very different from Ntozake Shange's 1975 experimental drama of interwoven poems which put you at a more comfortable physical distance from the traumas of seven ladies (nine in the movie) with a lot on their mind.

As viewed on a TV set from your couch, the passions are at times harrowing to a point empathetic viewers may find too much to bear. If, however, you can go with the emotional flow you are rewarded with an illuminating human encounter because of the exhilarating performances of this A List cast and because of Mr. Perry's intelligent and sensitive translation to the screen of Shange's seminal work.

Perry's direction does have weak spots. New York City looks at times Big Apple splendid, or gritty enough when circumstances called for that because of the painterly cinematography from Alexander Gruszynski. However, for instance, the entry way to the (drunken) abortionist's squalid apartment feels more stagy than horrifying. More significantly, many of the transitions from the story of one woman to another's come across as pauses that temporarily throw you out of the narrative rather than as segues.

"Sensitive" is not the word usually applied to those other of Tyler Perry's films also distributed by Lionsgate, in which he cross dresses to portray the uninhibited, optimistic, and outspoken Madea in a series of loud adventures.

Perry, who tells viewers in one of the DVD's special features that for his screenplay he took 14 of Shange's 20 poems and placed them in the context of a narrative he wrote, has attained a new artistic stature with "For Colored Girls," a leap from vaudeville skit to emotionally involving drama. Shange, who early on stated reservations about Perry bringing her extended choreo poem to the screen, has been supportive of the film.

In the stage play, the women were represented by colors and called as such, The Lady in Red, the Lady in Yellow, and the other arcs of that rainbow they were unable to appreciate because they felt so bad about themselves and how their lives were going (the play's full title is For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf).

Perry keeps those colors but they are represented through the spot-on costuming while the women are individually named. For examples, The Lady In Red is magazine executive Joanna Bradmore who doesn't want any more "sorrys" (played by Janet Jackson), the Lady in Green is rejected lover and community school instructor Juanita who resents that all her stuff was taken (played by Loretta Devine).

Costumer Johnetta Boone, herself African American, says in a special feature on the DVD that she based her designs on what people were wearing "in your average black community in the 1970s." (I did not see the 3-disc Blu-Ray Combo Pack special features but only those offered on the DVD single).

Others in this top flight cast include Anika Noni Rose, Thandie Newton, Whoopi Goldberg, Phylicia Rashad, Kimberly Elise, Tessa Thompson, and Kerry Washington. In supporting but vitally important roles are Michael Ealy, Macy Gray, Omari Hardwich, Hill Harper, Khalil Kain, and Richard Lawson.

These are remarkable performances from the entirely African American principals who have made the array of issues exampled by the characters into deeply personal quandaries.

Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls centers on stories of women who, as one of them says, "are betrayed by men who know us." Situations from rape to domestic violence to infidelity to HIV to sexual abuse or just plain disrespect, those soul-withering experiences poet Sonia Sanchez summed up as "wounded in the house of a friend." In the course of the narrative a number of these women move away from a low self esteem to the first tentative steps toward wellness, largely enabled to grow as individuals by the sisterhood they find with each other as their lives cross paths. They do so believably.

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For Colored Girls
DVD
$29.95
http://www.lionsgate.com/