Why Did I Get Married? (***)

Four and a half couples head for a remote Colorado lodge for a winter retreat in writer-director-actor Tyler Perry’s latest, adapted from his play. The half represents the “friend” one husband’s brought along on the flight, leaving his wife (Jill Scott) to drive there alone. (She’s obese, and the airline was going to charge her for two seats.) With this movie, Perry further establishes himself as the most mainstream chronicler of the black professional (or at least aspirational) class in America. He’s getting better at it too. Madea’s Family Reunion, his last film to date to feature his female title character, relied on borderline stereotyped outrageousness, and Perry’s cross dressing, for a comedy that seemed to exist side-by-side with a soapy melodrama. Daddy’s Little Girls, the one between that and this, leaned more to the latter. But here, the comic and the dramatic seem to ebb and flow naturally.

Naturally, given the title, all of the marriages here need work, and one seems a lost cause. That would be the one involving Scott’s philandered-upon character, whose future is pretty much telegraphed when she winds up lost (metaphorically and actually) in the office of the town sheriff, who lo and behold happens to be black. R&B star Scott brings as much emotionality to her performance as to her singing (which, surprisingly, is absent from the neo-soul-oriented soundtrack). Perry himself plays one of the husbands, a doctor married to a lawyer who’s too busy with her career. Even though he hasn’t had sex for months, he admonishes one of the other men about having cheated. I could sympathize with the other man, though, since his wife is the obvious shrew among the group, bickering with, berating, and embarrassing him (and others) for most of the movie, while providing the film with many of the laughs. One couple seems most idyllic (Janet Jackson plays the wife, a successful author), but a problem lies beneath the surface.

And so, the men talk about the women, the women talk about the men, the women talk to the men, and then everyone talks at once as all of the domestic issues come out in the open. It’s like a Dr. Phil episode dramatized, although, thankfully, without the doctor on hand. There’s not much subtlety here, unless you count the euphemism one of the cheaters uses for the venereal disease he caught. Perry’s tendency to want to wrap everything up cleanly results in pat, forced resolutions to most of the stories. It’s a wishful thinking sort of movie; maybe Perry wants to counteract the prevalent images of black people in cinema as, among other things, in dysfunctional relationships. Although for the most part Perry isn’t didactic, family values are on conscious display here. The couples are all married, of course, and more than one person makes casual references to God and Jesus in conversation. Notably, the women here are strong and independent, even, in a couple of cases, more successful, career-wise, than their men. Still, the men let them do all of the cooking.

While Perry still has room for improvement, he knows how to entertain, and it’s a credit to him that I didn’t have trouble keeping all of these characters straight. Maybe next time he won’t be afraid to screen his movie for critics.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/15/07