Manohla Dargis: For Colored Girls, “a thunderous storm of a movie”

The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis joins the chorus featured in For Colored Girls with important praise for Tyler Perry’s adaptation of Ntozake Shange‚Äôs “electric play”:

Mr. Perry has scrambled around the order of the poems, added his own connective tissue and characters, and shifted the time to the present, even while leaving resonant lines and swathes of passages intact… Throughout the film the characters move among realisms (kitchen sink, sudsy soap, exaggerated theatricality), connecting and separating, initially alone, though increasingly in synchronous harmony.

…done right it‚Äôs thrilling ‚Äî specific in its pain, universal in its reach ‚Äî and Mr. Perry works very hard and gets it mostly right. He succeeds even when art seems to have taken a back seat to commercial choices, as in the casting of Janet Jackson, who plays Jo, a magazine editor cut along the same cool lines of Meryl Streep in ‚ÄúThe Devil Wears Prada.‚Äù Ms. Jackson is, to put it gently, an actress of limited expression. But her quiet presence has force, partly because of her eerie resemblance to her brother Michael, though also because her character‚Äôs brittle hauteur, self-involved privilege and artificiality has ‚Äî like the martyrs in ermine played by the likes of Lana Turner ‚Äî its own weird truth.

Ms. Jackson‚Äôs marquee value, like that of Thandie Newton and Whoopi Goldberg, who play a warring mother and daughter, is doubtless its own justification. But the real draws in this version of ‚ÄúFor Colored Girls‚Äù are the less familiar names, like Kimberly Elise, who plays Crystal, Jo‚Äôs beleaguered assistant… as a woman who, in surrendering to her abuse (Michael Ealy plays her desperate lover-tormentor), pays a price so harrowing it‚Äôs almost impossible to watch. Ms. Elise enrages you with Crystal‚Äôs acquiescence and then, as she should, she rips into your heart…

As it turns out, Mr. Perry, while busily establishing his economic independence, has been finding his voice as a filmmaker. And here, working with fine performers like Ms. Elise, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington, he sings the song the way he likes it — with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity.