Maddening Diary a Tale to Forget

As a critic, there are times watching a movie at a screening where you can’t help but feel like you’re getting it wrong. The audience is whooping and hollering, basically having the gayest old time imaginable, and you sit there in utter disbelief, horrified anyone of even remotely sound mind is enjoying themselves. In fact, the movie in question is so painful, so beyond terrible, the fact that the audience you’re seeing it with apparently loves it to no end can’t help but make you question everything you ever thought you knew about what constitutes good entertainment.

That’s the situation I find myself facing with Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the debut feature from acclaimed music video director Darren Grant and based on the acclaimed play of the same name by Tyler Perry. There are many who tell me this is one of the best African American stage productions produced in the last twenty-plus years. There are many that tell me I need to broaden my perspectives and let the story’s themes and values wash over me. There are many who tell me lots of things, but none of them that do have actually seen this movie yet. For their own well being, in hopes they can always keep their sunny disposition, I hope they never do.

Diary is the story of Helen (Kimberly Elise), an upper-crust Atlanta socialite who married exceedingly well, her husband Charles (Steve Harris) one of the state’s leading (and most expensive) defense attorneys. But her seemingly perfect life is thrown in the gutter when Charles throws the pampered princess out on her perfectly powdered behind and into a U-Haul truck filled with the few belongings she can actually call her own. Devastated, Helen turns to the only person in her family she hasn’t alienated, the headstrong, gun-toting and more than a bit unhinged Madea (Perry).

Soon Helen is doing everything she can to help piece back together the shattered bits of her life. She gets a job as a waitress, works on rekindling a relationship with her elderly mother (Cicely Tyson) and enters into romance with kindhearted steel worker Orlando (Shemar Moore). But when unexpected tragedy strikes Charles, will Helen return to the man who almost murdered her spirit and unleash vindictive revenge, or will she instead take the road less traveled and offer sweet forgiveness instead? The better question, by the time this movie makes up its amazingly conservative mind will anyone even remotely care (or even be in the audience)?

Diary of a Mad Black Woman is so unrelentingly awful I’m not sure where to begin. A hodgepodge of Soul Food, Waiting to Exhale, Misery, An Officer and a Gentleman and one of UPN’s ubiquitous ethnic sitcoms, this movie hasn’t a clue as to what it’s about or where it is going. Grant shows absolutely no skill for establishing a consistent tone or visual esthetic, instead bouncing the movie from scene to scene as if it was a ping pong ball pounding against a surreal brick wall made entirely of sponge cake. Sweet and sticky and full of treacle that would give a cavity cavities, its moral convictions are still so immutable they might as well be made of lead.

Feel sorry for the talented cast. Fresh off stellar work in both The Manchurian Candidate and the otherwise forgettable Woman Thou Art Loosed, Elise deserves far better than the cliché-ridden stereotype she’s forced to portray here. That’s better than can be said for either Harris (who’s essentially rerunning performances he gave on David E. Kelly’s The Practice) and Moore (who, while undeniably attractive, showed far more grit and determination on the short-lived WB series Birds of Prey then he does here), both good actors crushed by director Grant’s heavy hand. Only writer Perry emerges unscathed. Playing three completely dissimilar characters, like Eddie Murphy in the Nutty Professor films the playwright-turned-thespian manages to make them all distinctly their own. In a picture devoid of anything even remotely resembling a bright spot his presence is nearly a blessing in three multifaceted disguises.

It’s not near enough. This movie is such a painful headache inducing mess it was all I could do to not walk out. I kept telling myself it had to get better, that things couldn’t possible get any worse. But then they do, over and over again, and you can’t help but wonder if the values Diary of a Mad Black Woman are trying to stress aren’t Christian at all, but instead some cleverly disguised peon to all that’s demonic and sinful. Trust me, when the only completely sympathetic character starts chain-smoking and unceremoniously dumps an apparently quadriplegic loved one into a hot tub, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

In the end, for me this movie boils down to a sequence set during a church service where everything that could go wrong does. Not only are all other non-Christian religions called into disrepute (with a completely straight face, I might add), but a little child manages to lead the way, a cripple finds salvation and suddenly walks once more while a drug-addicted sinner comes clean finding both her singing voice and salvages her decaying marriage. The only thing missing was the dead rising from the grave, but in a picture stuffed to the gills with cliché upon cliché one more probably would have made it explode.

What I don’t get, and maybe I never will, is why some continue to lap this kind of tripe up. Are audiences so hard up for entertainment, especially minority audiences, that’s they’re willing to accept mediocrity if it seemingly makes up for the lack of entertainment usually offered their way? I really hope not, because they, all of us actually, deserve far, far better, and the only thing Diary of a Mad Black Woman is make me want to take an anger management class to get rid of all this pent up animosity.

Film Rating: ê  (out of 4)