'For Coloured Girls' Review: All the Trite Cliches of the Rainbow .

For some people, learning that Tyler Perry was going to save and take the film adaptation of 'For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf' must have been like finding out Garry Marshall was passing to take 'End of a Salesman.' Ntozake Shange's 1975 theatrical piece was an acclaimed work of prose poetry that examined what it way to be a negro woman.

Tyler Perry makes hammy melodramas that turn the African-American experience into cliches and platitudes. Finesse would be needed to change the hook 'For Coloured Girls' into something cinematic. There was some concern that Tyler Perry would . you know . Tyler Perry it up. I have no delight in reporting that those fears were justified. Tyler Perry has Tyler Perried the hell out of this thing. Shange's collection of poetic monologues chronicles all manner of traumas, from everyday things like broken relationships and infidelities to rape, domestic violence, and abortion. On the present or the page, these things are recounted with mournful beauty. The movie, going by the shorter (but still awkward) title 'For Coloured Girls,' must figure out the ideas into actual scenes - supply the characters who were previously only mentioned, give those characters dialogue, make the abstract concrete - and in the process cheapens them. Now it's only a junky soap opera. Or at least that's the effect of Perry's touch. To be fair, even a very talented writer and director might have ground it unacceptable to do this stuff influence on the big screen. But Perry doesn't do himself any favors by amping up the melodrama and hysterics. For example, an incredibly shocking event that comes at the selfsame end of the play - and yet so is just described as having already happened, not depicted before our eyes - has been touched to the centre of the film and is acted out in detail, for maximum effect. What was a harrowing tragedy in the work is a manipulative gimmick in the movie. Perry's version is set mostly in a rundown Harlem apartment building. In one whole is Tangie (Thandie Newton), a barkeeper and freelance whore whose little sister, Nyla (Tessa Thompson), is starting to be in her light footsteps. Across the hall lives Crystal (Kimberly Elise), whose alcoholic veteran boyfriend, Beau (Michael Ealy), beats on her and their two young children. Kelly (Kerry Washington) is a social worker who checks on Crystal's kids. Crystal works as an assistant for Jo (Janet Jackson), a mega-rich fashion-magazine editor with aught but disdain for poor people. Juanita (Loretta Devine) is a nurse who runs a non-profit organization helping inner-city women. Tangie and Nyla's mother, Alice (Whoopi Goldberg), is a hellfire-and-brimstone religious fanatic. Yasmine (Anika Noni Rose) teaches dance to Nyla and early teenage girls. Gilda (Phylicia Rashad) manages the apartment building and tries to maintain an eye on her tenants. These characters cross each other's paths in that 'Crash,' rich-tapestry-of-life sort of way. While it's occasionally contrived, it's not a bad device for turn the unnamed archetypes of the play into actual characters. You can even make them reach their monologues, even if parts of those speeches are now delivered to other characters while having dinner or walk down the street rather than simply addressed to the audience. In fact, the film works quite well when the actresses are projected to Shange's original text. It doesn't sound like dialogue; it sounds like highly theatrical and evocative poetry. The language sizzles with raw emotion and pain. Depending on the quality of the performance - and they run from the fiery Loretta Devine to the dull Janet Jackson - some of these moments are really effective. The problem, to put it bluntly, is everything else. The mortar that Perry has used to meet the bricks of Shange's play is the cheapest, crappiest material available. The plot points that take in the details are standard Lifetime Movie Channel fare: secretly gay husbands, nice guys who work out to be rapists, infertility caused by STDs, back-alley abortions administered by a chain-smoking crone who sterilizes her instruments in bourbon, etc. Sometimes this banality can be protected by the matriarchal strength of Phylicia Rashad, or by Kimberly Elise's unadorned sincerity. Usually, though, it's just laughably trite. And I do mean laughably. When a rape victim sees her attacker dead in a morgue and her response is to slap his dead face as if challenging him to a duel, what reaction other than laughter can we possibly be expected to get? Underneath Tyler Perry's incompetence, buried but still visible, are the ideas that have made so many women respond so powerfully to this work for 35 years. The thought that to know a man, especially sexually, means giving up contribution of yourself, relinquishing some of your power. The thought that to be a woman is hard enough without having to deal with other women tearing you apart. But Perry's version winds up emphasizing the same theme as all of his early films: men are serious and troublesome, and women would do good to steer clear of them. I don't believe that's what Ntozake Shange intended for us to get out of her work - but I'd guess there's a lot of material in this corpse-slapping, date-raping, incest-implying, child-defenestrating debacle that Ntozake Shange didn't intend.