Tyler Perry doesn’t need movie critics. His last three films opened without the benefit of opening-day reviews, and they did just fine at the box office. “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns,” just released on DVD, worked the same magic.
“Browns” follows a single mother named Brenda (Angela Bassett) who loses her job in the film’s opening moments. She’s toughed out worse situations, but she’s tired of holding her head high while caring for her two daughters and b-ball loving son, Michael (Lance Gross).
When she learns her father, whom she never met, has died, she takes the family to Georgia for the funeral. There she meets the Browns, a gaggle of cartoonish characters who treat her as one of the family. That means they tease her, stuff her with food and embrace her, all more or less at once. It’s exhausting, but Perry orchestrates a few moving moments between the screeching.
Meanwhile, Brenda gets to know Harry (Rick Fox), a basketball coach who wants to make sure Michael reaches his potential. Harry falls for Brenda hard, but she’s been burned enough times to be wary of any man’s flirtations.
“Meet the Browns” nicely balances faith, perseverance and the need to build nurturing communities. It’s also funnier than I expected. Some of Perry’s lines are classic, even if the slapstick moments fall mostly flat. Why Perry feels the need to burden the audience with so many subplots is a mystery. They only distract us from Bassett’s glorious performance. She’s proud, pugnacious and oh, so beautiful in every scenes.
But then there’s Madea (Perry in drag), Perry’s alter ego and an audience favorite who shows up for a laughless cameo. Madea’s scenes seem spliced in from a separate movie, and a lousy one at that.
Perry’s films help to shatter some cinematic stereotypes. Michael is neither a hip-hop loving thug nor a choir boy, and few black actresses will get roles as juicy and real as Bassett’s Brenda. Yet some film critics insist his films reinforces a few archetypes, and one look at the Browns’ most garish member (David Mann as Leroy Brown) shows they may have a point. And why does Perry cast Sofia Vergara as yet another “spicy Latina” caricature? Ay caramba.
“Meet the Browns” suffers some serious flaws, but Bassett’s full-bodied performance and some eye moistening sequences equal another hit for the Perry machine.
(Photo: Angela Bassett and Sofia Vergara shoot the breeze during “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns”)
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