For Colored Girls (2010)

This film is Tyler Perry's adaptation of Ntozake Shange's award-winning Broadway play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. The powerful work is a collection of, what Shange calls "choreopoems," about the complexities of black female identity and our struggles. The play debuted in 1974 but her message about black girl blues still resonates today: abuse, infidelity, poverty, sexism, defining our sexuality, fighting for respect. The list goes on.
Let me state up front, 'Madea' most surely aside, I am a big Tyler Perry fan. He has consistently populated his films with people of color who are often unknown and who a great job. I think he has some issues, and things that don't go perfectly all the time, but I am a fan. I see all his non-Madea movies when they come out and I am rarely disappointed. Which leaves me, once again, at odds with the critics, who hardly ever have a good word for him. Here Perry has chosen a stellar and largely well-known cast -- Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad, Kimberly Elise, Loretta Devine, Thandie Newton, Kerry Washington and Tessa Thompson. His rendition takes place in a modern-day urban America--with some very dated language that hearkens back to the original play. The acting is solid. Unfortunately, some of the script is not.
The first half of the film connects all of the women through nine story lines, which is choppy and hard to get emotionally involved with at first, but it does draw together in the second half. There is also too much poetry from Shange's original work into the script. Kerry Washington plays Kelly, a social worker married to Hill Harper's character Donald. In one scene Kelly explains to Donald she's infertile because of an STD she contracted years ago. She goes into a poem about a lover who cheated on her with one of her college friends-- the poem doesn't fit and may confuse some in the audience, especially those unfamiliar with the play (as am I). But the extreme issues that occur with all women, not just black women, are told convincingly here. We watch the consequences play out in different ways. There is incest, there is mental illness, there is domestic violence, there is substance abuse, there is seeking forgiveness and there is pushing it away. It is very powerful--as one critic put it--fascinating and flawed. But worth a viewing.