REVIEW: Heavy-Handed For Colored Girls Can't Sink Its Actresses

More surprising than the fact that For Colored Girls, Tyler Perry's deliriously lush, regrettably swollen adaptation of Ntozake Shange's 1970's Broadway phenomenon, doesn't work is the extent to which it almost does. Shange's earthy, epiphanic tone poem -- an ode to the ascendant black woman, and her many iterations -- presents a considerable screenwriting challenge: Its characters are colors, its impact a combination of sustained lyrical -- and lexical -- intensity and theatrical choral force. Perry's ambition in translating the work to the screen is determined and true; the film's main fascination is that of watching a director struggle to honor Shange's choreopoem and then lose the battle not with the material but with himself.

The play's seven characters are here increased to nine, and an opening sequence introduces each one as she prepares to face the day. A montage in which each woman recites a few lines from "Dark Phrases" sets a tremulous, incantatory tone, but soon enough we're back on Perry's quotidian turf -- in this case a Harlem apartment complex where several of the characters reside. Shiftless bartender Tangie (Thandie Newton, off the chain and channeling Eartha Kitt) sends home last night's pick-up with a simpering shrug; across the hall Crystal (the astonishing Kimberly Elise) is steeling herself for a day's work, and then a night's trouble with the alcoholic veteran (Michael Ealy) who fathered her two children. Between them lives Gilda (Phylicia Rashad), the apartment manager who clucks over Tangie's revolving door and tsks after Crystal's cycle of domestic abuse.

Crystal works for Jo (Janet Jackson, looking so much like her late brother with cropped hair, ringed eyes, and red lips that the audience gasped when she appeared), a bitterly successful magazine editor with a conspicuous (*cough*) cough and a husband (Omari Hardwicke) doing her dirty. Kelly (Kerry Washington), a child welfare worker assigned to Crystal's case, is trying to get pregnant with her detective boyfriend (Hill Harper), but the STD some previous creep gave her has done a number on her tubes. Also getting played is Juanita (Loretta Devine), a sexual-health educator with a no-good, fair-weather boyfriend (Richard Lawson). About to be played are Yasmine (Anika Noni Rose), an incandescent dance instructor with a suspiciously perfect suitor (Khalil Kain), and Nyla (Tessa Thompson), her student, whose first sexual experience was also too good to be true.

Is that everybody? Not quite: Whoopi Goldberg appears as Alice, the mother of Nyla and Tangie. A cult-addled hoarder with a big old family secret, Alice isn't big on men, or the things they do to her daughters. Perry, whose directorial instincts tend toward the flat and stagey, proves adept at establishing his network of characters and the intersections of their lives; fluid camera work helps build a rhythm as the women tag each other in and out of scenes, meting out each storyline at a manageable clip. Perry weaves together not just the individual stories but their arcs, sustaining the emotional tenor across the progress of nine lives. It's when that tenor goes into yowling, mach-four overdrive that the film's bottom drops out, and the actresses, who are almost across the board an exceptional and often ravishing pleasure to behold, are caught out by a film that can't match their commitment.

That failure is not necessarily a function of Perry's determination to stay literal: When the scenes that lapse into rhapsodic readings of Shange's poetry work -- as with Juanita's run-tell-that recitation of "Somebody Almost Walked Off Wid Alla My Stuff" and the delectable, queenly Rashad's rapprochement with Newton's feral hellcat -- they are electrifying. But the pile-up of lurid misfortunes -- kicked off by perhaps the worst cross-cutting mash-up of all time, involving one character's rape and a night at the opera (thanks for nothing, Coppola) -- grabs the film by the weave and drags it into the melodramatic gutter. The last 45 minutes are an unrelenting siege of lady-flowering catharsis in which every character is granted her baptism -- by snotty, teary, prolonged close-up -- into awakened womanhood.

The pattern numbs the powerful text, and the big moments begin to bleed into each other. As monologues, they are frequently breathtaking; each performer acts her face off, and even the easy-to-mock, lavish emotionality demands its due. But the threads holding the whole thing together grow bare and eventually pull apart. There's far too much heart in For Colored Girls to hate it, and too much talent on vulnerable, rapturous display. I left exhausted and exasperated, marveling at what this array of actresses was willing to give to Tyler Perry, and wishing he had returned not just the favor but the gift.