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Meet the Browns 拜见布朗一家 英语影评
The Court Street 12-plex in Brooklyn is a perfectly ordinary movie theater, a vertically arranged variation on what is found in suburban shopping malls throughout the land. It is a place to watch Hollywood blockbusters in stadium seating with a concession-stand combo special in your lap. The crowds, though, are anything but generic, thanks to the cinema’s location. It’s an easy trip from both brownstones and housing projects, a short walk from the blue-collar Fulton Street Mall and the gentrified retail strips of Court and Smith Streets south of Atlantic Avenue. It’s one of those increasingly rare New York spots where the city’s various demographic strands cross and commingle.
But since this is a week to speak openly about race, I should note that, at 11 o’clock on Good Friday morning, I was the only white person at a nearly full showing of “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns.” I was probably also the only person who was there for work rather than pleasure, though the pleasure in the room was pretty contagious. Mr. Perry has never received much love from members of my profession, and like his last few movies, “Meet the Browns” arrived in theaters on Friday without holding advance press screenings.
Not that he needs us — critics, I mean. His work may be rooted in the experience of a particular group, but there is nothing exclusive about it. His ideas about family, religion, love and community — and the contradictions and collisions among those things — are unlikely to seem exotic anywhere.
Mr. Perry, after all, is one of the few genuine populists left in American filmmaking. There are plenty of panderers and showmen, of course, and legions of market researchers and focus-group tweakers. But Mr. Perry built his audience the hard way and over the long haul, first on the traveling theater circuit catering to African-American audiences and then with a series of movies, beginning with “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” in 2005.
Madea, the vociferous, big-boned grandmother Mr. Perry played in that film (and then in “Madea’s Family Reunion”), makes a brief, raucous cameo near the end of “Meet the Browns.” Not for any reason having to do with the picture’s many story lines, but just as a kind of lagniappe, a gift of pure silliness for the loyal public. Up until then most of the comic work has been capably performed by David Mann, playing a garishly dressed Southern fellow named Leroy Brown, and Jenifer Lewis, as his viper-tongued, liquored-up sister Vera.
Those are some of the Browns encountered by Brenda (Angela Bassett), a hard-pressed single mother of three children who travels from Chicago to a small town in Georgia to attend the funeral of the father she never knew. Vera and Leroy, along with the relatively more staid Sarah (Margaret Avery), Cora (Tamela Mann) and L. B. (Frankie Faison), turn out to be members of Brenda’s extended family. They provide both broad humor and warm, hometown wisdom, two elements that combine with florid melodrama and hard-won romance to complete Mr. Perry’s entertainment formula.
Other recurring traits in his films are stiff dialogue, uneven acting and a directing style that can best be described as functional. Still, the plentiful close-ups of Ms. Bassett’s face, one of the most beautiful and expressive in movies, nearly make up for the overall visual drabness.
She sometimes seems too agile and refined an actress for material this broad — in her scenes with Rick Fox, who plays a possible love interest, she pretty much acts for both of them — but her skills come in handy when displays of large and intense emotion are required.
Which is a lot. The plot is too crowded for summary here. Mr. Perry treats a story a little like a banquet table, loading it up with more stuff than is healthy or easily digestible. But this is an aspect of his generosity, his desire to sate and satisfy a hungry audience. What he serves up — a mixture of moralism and forgiveness, semibawdy humor and cautionary drama, mockery and affection — may sometimes lack coherence, but never integrity.
His sensibility is sentimental and forgiving, but he does not soften his presentation of some hard facts of life. Poverty, drug dealing, the abandonment of children by their fathers — these are among the problems Brenda and her children face. Mr. Perry does not linger morbidly over them, but neither does he wish them away.
His films are hardly realistic, but they aren’t exercises in pure escapism either. They offer comic relief and moral correction. And if they feel corny and hokey at times — O.K., a lot of the time — that is partly because they make everyone who sees them, white critics included, feel right at home.
“Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some sexual innuendoes and drug references.
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