You might look at this post and say "You're slipping, Vance. Just using the name of a new movie as the subject matter of your post, in its entirety? You can do better than that."
The more observant of you will notice, though, that this is not what I'm doing. If I were putting a title in the subject of my post, the words would all be capitalized, and there would be italics.
In this case, the homecoming to Madea in my Sunday night viewing of A Madea Homecoming is a personal one. And I don't even need to italicize the word "Madea" because it is the name of a franchise. I don't italicize casual references to "Batman" and "Star Wars," unless I am talking about 1989's Batman or 1977's Star Wars. With a whopping dozen titles in its extended universe over 17 years, there are now more Madea movies than there are either Batman or Star Wars movies (only just).
It's a homecoming for me because I used to watch most of these movies. I saw five of the first seven, starting with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in 2005. I saw Madea's Family Reunion and Meet the Browns before missing my first, which was Madea Goes to Jail. I also missed I Can Do Bad All By Myself before I was back on board for the next two, Madea's Big Happy Family and Madea's Witness Protection. Tyler Perry has been a busy man, as there have been a number of films he's directed since 2005 that are only Madea adjacent, some of which I have also seen (The Family That Preys, Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor and A Fall From Grace, while I've missed such films as Daddy's Little Girls, Why Did I Get Married? and its dubiously titled sequel, Why Did I Get Married Too?).
I suppose calling them "Madea adjacent" is not fully accurate, since if there were an explicit connection to Perry's drag matriarch, they would be part of the extended universe on Wikipedia. I think of them as Madea adjacent, I suppose, simply because they involve Perry. That's how prominent this character has been for him.
But I haven't seen any of the Madea movies -- A Madea Christmas, Boo! A Madea Halloween, Boo 2! A Madea Halloween and A Madea Family Funeral -- since I moved to Australia, which is probably not a coincidence. Before these movies started debuting on Netflix -- A Madea Homecoming is the second to do so -- you had to either see them in the theater (something I still don't think I've ever done) or rent them. Suffice it to say that movies that specifically examine the experience of Black people in America, that aren't also critically acclaimed, have only belatedly become available in Australia in any real way. If the latest Madea movie had a theatrical debut, I doubt it would actually play in Australian theaters, even today. For the distributor, I imagine it is a simple cost-benefit analysis, and they've determined that the cost to advertise and distribute Madea movies in Australia is not justified by the historically paltry benefit of expected ticket sales.
But I always wanted to watch these movies, not because I thought a) I'm the target audience for them, or b) I had any real chance to enjoy them as much as Perry hoped I would. In truth, I have enjoyed a number of them, and if I hadn't started out impressed by Diary of a Mad Black Woman -- impressed with reservations, I should note -- then maybe I never would have continued. It's sort of a miracle I did, considering how much I hated Madea's Family Reunion.
No, I wanted to watch them for the film critic idealism of giving every widely released film an equal opportunity (loaded phrase there) to be reviewed. And also for the attempt to use Roger Ebert's empathy machine -- that's what he called cinema -- to put myself in the perspective of the people who were its target audience. Even if Madea's hijinks are a tad to broad for me personally, I thought I could figure out how to judge them on their own terms, and decide what worked and what didn't work within that specific context. Plus there was also a melodramatic story in each of these that was running parallel to the Madea hijinks, with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in particular establishing that template. Just because I'm calling it melodrama -- even Perry would probably call it melodrama -- doesn't mean I'm undercutting it, as some of that material is quite effective.
I did review a handful of these for AllMovie, where I was writing back in the 2000s, including each of the first three -- though probably none after that, given how I wound down writing for that site in 2011. Mission accomplished I suppose.
Now in 2022, on the last day of Black History Month, I am trying to decide whether I will review A Madea Homecoming.
For one thing there is the whole Australian audience thing I alluded to earlier. I'm pretty sure that my largely hipster audience on ReelGood is not going to care that much, if at all, about the latest Madea movie. It's what the distributors decided ages ago when they decided against an incursion into Australia. It's not these hipsters' fault; they just weren't raised on it. And they rightly identify a lowest common denominator aspect to it that keeps them away, even if they are trying to be more woke. They might read a Madea review as a way to gawk at it and see what I'd say about it, but not because of any actual interest in seeing the movie.
Or maybe they identify the thing that I've identified over the years that make me hesitant to even watch these movies:
How negative can I be about them before it starts to seem like I'm engaged in a sort of race-based cruelty, or at the very least, like I'm tone deaf and uncharitable?
Aye, there's the rub. Because Perry's Madea movies are made specifically with the least discerning potential audience members in mind -- audience members who are drawn to the broadness and ability to laugh at themselves unselfconsciously -- they rarely make for truly accomplished cinema. Perry randomly throws in a few attempts at creative scene transitions, but they stick out for how indiscriminately they are used, calling attention to the attempt to be something that these movies clearly aren't.
When you are accustomed to judging something according to relatively high standards for use of the tools of cinema, it's hard to engage with a film that doesn't care about that at all -- especially when it's made by someone demographically different than yourself.
It's an issue I keep returning to on this blog: how to engage with art made by creators of other genders, races, sexual orientations or gender identities, and say you dislike the work without it seeming like a function of your constitutional inability to relate to it.
If I do review the movie -- and I really need the content this week, which is why I chose to watch it on Sunday -- I know there is no chance I will give it any more than two stars, which translates to 4/10 on ReelGood's rating system. I'll give you a couple reasons why, after a SPOILER warning.
The film opens with one of the broadest sequences I have seen in any of these movies. The recurring character played by David Mann, Mr. Brown, is preparing a BBQ for his son's visit, in celebration of his son being named valedictorian of his class. Madea and her perpetually incorrect brother, Joe (also Perry), are watching these preparations with bemusement. Brown is overwhelming the BBQ with lighter fluid, finishing up one bottle and going on to the next. He goes through about three normal sized lighter fluid bottles this way, then moves on to the sort of gas can you keep in the back of your car if you run out of gas and have to walk to a gas station, complete with the long nozzle. He continues this activity despite Joe finally coming out to tell him he's put on too much.
Of course he's put on too much. An infant would know he'd put on too much. But he keeps going. For like five minutes.
When he finally lights the match, he immediately goes up in flames and runs around the yard. For like five minutes. Okay maybe one minute. As if discounting the possibility that he could burn to death, neither Madea nor Joe does much to help. Madea "hilariously" fills up a tea cup of water to try to douse him. When that has little effect, she tries the hose, only to find its stream to be piddly. Finally she gets Joe to trip Brown so his own body contact with the ground will douse the flames, something Brown might have figured out himself if he weren't in an (understandable) state of total panic. Of course, neither would this probably really work.
As you might guess, Brown only has a few burnt piece of clothing, notably the ass missing from his pants. Otherwise he's fine.
I have no idea if a Black audience finds this funny. I did not find it funny. The whole scene is ill-conceived and makes everyone in it look bad.
Fortunately, there's nothing else quite this broad in the movie.
For me, Madea movies have always been saved, if they were saved, by the plot that does not directly involve Madea. There are some movies in the Madea cinematic universe -- like Meet the Browns -- that only feature her tangentially, like one broad comic scene, usually involving her toting a gun, that is at odds with the rest of the movie, but is shoehorned in for audiences who just came to see Madea. Madea is best used like a spice, in small rather than overwhelming quantities.
This implies that most of these movies are up to something different and often socially progressive, which is the real saving grace of the Madea series. These movies have tackled domestic abuse and other serious topics over the years.
A Madea Homecoming gets off on the right foot in this regard. After the broad opening, we meet Brown's son Tim (Brandon Black) and his "friend" Davi (Isha Blaaker). (I don't actually know if we "meet" Tim or if he was in other movies that I haven't seen.) You'll see why I use those quotation marks on "friend" in a moment. They're driving home and talking about how Tim really wants to come out to his family, and how Davi is encouraging him but is reluctant to do the same himself. It is heavily implied that these two are lovers, and some physical contact they make further invites that interpretation.
This is very promising. The Black community has struggled with its acceptance of homosexuality, which would be a politically prudent venture as Blacks and gays both have a friend in the Democratic party. Perry wants to tackle this and confront the audiences who may love Madea but not love gays.
Except then he backs off. Rather incredibly, it is revealed that Davi is not lovers with Tim, but rather, has been carrying on an affair with Tim's mother, Laura (Gabrielle Dennis). See, I told you it was melodramatic. At first we think Tim is so shocked at this revelation because Davi has been simultaneously carrying on an affair with him and his own mother, which would raise a lot of questions indeed. I mean, we're sure, based on what the film has told us, that Tim and Davi are dating. As it turns out, he's just mad because Davi didn't tell him, and because it's weird for Tim's best friend to be dating his own mother, meaning Davi could potentially become Tim's stepfather.
So instead of confronting audiences with two gay men in love on screen, Perry gives us only one gay man who is not seen in a sexual context whatsoever. Baby steps, I guess. But this is a rather shocking form of purposeless misdirection, and I'm almost tempted to watch it again just to determine how bogus it really is, how heavily the film implied, if not outright stated, that Tim and Davi are in a relationship.
So how can I write a review of A Madea Homecoming without saying that the film bungles both the broad Madea scenes and the positive social messaging?
How indeed. And I'm still trying to decide whether I will.
I can't artificially inflate the grade. I could talk myself into a 4/10, but this film is really more of a 3/10 at best. I didn't really laugh -- again, not the target demographic -- and I didn't get the feels from anything the film was trying to do politically.
So what value does it serve for me to review this film for a bunch of Australian hipsters who wouldn't watch it anyway, for whom my low rating is basically a confirmation of the bias they already bring into it?
It's like when someone is behaving like a jackass on the road, and when you finally pass them, you can't resist the urge to look over and see who it was. This is almost always a fraught activity. You are effectively trying to figure out if the driving confirms some sort of pre-existing bias in yourself. The only time it wouldn't confirm that is if the person in the other car looked exactly like you.
I don't watch Madea movies to confirm biases, either my own or anyone else's. But I'm not in the habit of censoring myself either.
Stay tuned to see if this pops up in my reviews to the right. This could be a thorny one.
No comments:
Post a Comment