The Ottery
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When God Speaks Through a Pistol-Toting Grandma: Diary of a Mad Black Woman

April 5th, 2006

Sometimes I like films (properly pronounced “feelms” with a superior sneer on one’s face) and sometimes I like movies. Diary of a Mad Black Woman is a movie, and proud of it.

I’d never heard of Tyler Perry, writer and actor behind last year’s Diary and this year’s Madea’s Family Reunion until Entertainment Weekly did a short feature article on him, an article titled “The Gospel According to Tyler Perry.” You know that got my attention.

Perry is very up-front about how his Christian faith motivates everything he does. He originally created the character of Madea (which is not a misspelling of “Medea”—it’s a contraction of “mother dear”) in a series of popular and successful stage plays. Perry discovered that Madea made people laugh, and once he got them laughing, they would be open to hearing a message of forgiveness and love. He openly states that he hopes his plays reach the unsaved. So many people, saved and un-, were flocking to Perry’s plays that he was selling out to auditoriums of thousands, and yet more people wanted in. Hollywood seemed the natural place to go.

Madea is indeed a great character. “She,” of course, is played by Tyler Perry himself, in drag, with coke-bottle glasses and the ever-present pistol in her handbag. (Perry also plays Madea’s brother Joe and Joe’s son Brian, long-suffering husband to a drug addict). She herself isn’t much of a churchgoer—she claims she’ll start attending once they get a smoking section—nor does she preach the film’s main message of forgiveness, but she does help characters get to the point where they love themselves. You gotta get mad first, have to have a sense of your own worth, before you can forgive those who have wronged you.

When Madea’s granddaughter Helen is kicked out of her own house by her husband of eighteen years, who promptly installs his mistress in her place, Madea encourages the spineless Helen to demand her fair share. There’s a hilarious scene in which Madea and Helen break into the husband’s house, and Madea instructs Helen in how to rip up the mistress’s designer clothes. Helen’s ripping grows in strength until she pauses and asks, “Wait . . . what’s this going to solve?” “Nothin,’” Madea cheerfully answers. “It’s just gonna make you feel better!”

Vengeance doesn’t solve anything for Helen, but it’s a necessary stage in her journey of learning to value herself. Along with Madea, the blue-collar all-around good guy Orlando teaches Helen this lesson by loving her with the persistent love of Jesus. It’s no accident that the song playing during the scenes showing their developing relationship is “What If God Was One of Us?” (Yes, that’s right, the one by Joan Osborne from about ten years ago. Only here the song is sung gospel-style and has a totally different tone. The singer even adds an ad-libbed “I know that” before the familiar chorus of “Yeah, yeah, God is great. Yeah, yeah, God is good,” making it completely sincere. I actually miss the ambiguity of the original. I always took it to mean something along the lines of “Yeah, I’ve heard that God is great and good and all that, but I want to see it with my own eyes in terms that I can understand,” but it was always open to interpretation, and I liked that. I also was really fond of the verse, “If God had a face, what would it look like / and would you want to see / if seeing meant that you would have to believe / in things like heaven and in Jesus and the saints / and all the prophets,” which you don’t hear in the movie. Okay, major digression there.)

In many ways, “What if God was one of us?” is the central question of the movie. If he were Orlando, he would love Helen until her emotional walls break down. If he were Helen, he would forgive her ex-husband, hard as that might be. “You got to forgive him,” Helen’s mother (played by Cicely Tyson) tells her. “Not for him. For you.” (As Anne Lamott has written, “not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”)

And that’s Tyler Perry’s strength: taking God’s love and putting it in flawed, broken human vessels. I do have some problems with the ending of Diary of a Mad Black Woman (see note below if you don’t mind spoilers), but I enjoyed seeing God’s love embodied in such a wide variety of characters. My new favorite definition of love actually comes from Orlando. “I pray for you more than I pray for myself,” he tells Helen. “I’ve got it so bad for you I’d… I’d go to the grocery store and buy your feminine products, I swear I would.” Tee hee! (Hear that, Porpoise dear?)

Spoiler Alert!

After Helen’s ex-husband Charles has a near-death injury, his mistress abandons him and Helen tries to take care of him, not really sure whether she’s really trying to “do the Christian thing” or whether she’s trying to get revenge. Eventually, Charles repents and apologizes for all the wrong he’s done to Helen. She forgives him, but then she goes off to marry Orlando.

Now, Charles was an awful husband, but old “marriage is a sacrament” me thinks that if he really repented, Helen ought to stay and try to work it out with him (but to leave if he ever hit her again!). It turns out that she actually did stay with Charles in the stage version of Diary of a Mad Black Woman. Perry says that he would get letters of protest from younger women who’d seen the play, who thought she ought to leave Charles for Orlando. Women over 40, he said, almost always applauded her decision to stay with Charles. So, when it came time to make the movie, Hollywood’s attempts to appeal to younger viewers won the day. Sigh.

Entry Filed under: Movies