Go See "For Colored Girls"

My heart and mind are full of this movie today, after my wife and I saw it last night. Until I read this review in our local paper by Mick LaSalle, I was wondering how Tyler Perry, whose Madea movie trailers are enough to make me never want to see the movies, could possibly do justice to this womanist play. LaSalle’s review reassured me. I’m no movie reviewer and what I have to say here is a personal take that will include a possible spoiler, so it would be best to read that review instead if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
I do urge you to go. I haven’t seen as deep a take on the human condition in many a day.
Which makes it curious that almost everyone in the theater last night was Black. My wife and I (white) sat near the front, so we left among the first and then I waited while she went to the women’s room, so everyone else passed me and after a while I saw a white woman and it occurred to me that I couldn’t recall anyone else who wasn’t African American in that stream of people coming out. Maybe I missed some. But nearly all those Latinos, Asians and whites we had been lining up with to get tickets had gone to one of the other dozen movies at the multiplex. This was in Richmond, California, a city that is incidentally 36% African American. I assume it will be different in metropolitan centers, but in this neighborhood the movie had been clearly labeled in everyone’s minds as a Black movie. And not just that, but a movie for Black women, as most women came with their women friends, and I was in a small male minority.
Big mistake. This is for everyone.
Imagine if Shakespeare had been a minority woman writing about her minority in Elizabethan England? Would only women from her minority have gone to see her plays? Would she have been able to write a quarter as many, without the wider audience? How many potential Shakespeares have been lost for that reason? That incalculable sorrow aside, Ntozake Shange did write her 1975 play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, and an extraordinary movie based on it has now got made and it needs a wide audience.
It was my wife who said the movie made her think of Shakespeare and that immediately sounded right to me, not least because  the characters suddenly start speaking Shange’s poetry, usually in longish monologues, in the middle of some highly dramatic moment. You wouldn’t think it would work but it not only does work, in the sense of being somehow believable and not jarring, but it shifts everything to a deeper level in an instant. The actors playing these women are extraordinary, both those well known (at least to me) and those not; each has her poetic moment at least once, and each makes it work to bring us into her character’s heart, mind and soul. I found some of the poetry hard to understand at first hearing, some instantly accessible. But, as in well acted Shakespeare where I experience the same thing, the effect created by these actors was to shift us into a sense that this character — whether a drunk abortionist, a religious fanatic, a hard-ass magazine editor, a sex addict, a victim of horrific male violence (which most of them are in one way or another) — has the full range of human depth and complexity within her. Maybe that elicits a “duh” as in, of course she does and who would have thought otherwise, but that’s not what most movie drama shows us about oppressed women, especially low income Black women.
Although the story has terrible tragedies within it, it is not “a tragedy” in the sense of a Lear or Othello. I may get into trouble for saying what I think, which is that the movie is too American for that, too wedded to the idea of redemption and hope. But instead of going for a cheap Hollywood version of hope, it goes deep, to the real thing. That kind of American positivity is a source of the beautiful, hopeful, and real.
SPOILER ALERT. One of the bravest moments in the movie, to my mind, comes when an older woman, played by Phylicia Rashad, who has come to some real wisdom through her own hard life, counsels a younger woman who, having lost everything to a violent man, is near mad with grief and loss. The Rashad character asks her to consider how much responsibility she bears herself, for staying with that man she loved long beyond the time when she should have left. She counsels that she will never recover until she truly faces herself. Later this young woman does recover, when she does examine her responsibility and, far beyond that, is blessed with an epiphany. She tells the other women:

I found God in myself
And I loved her
I loved her fiercely

Is that not the way we all need and long to go? I believe so, whether we go there with belief in God or in some unnameable mystery of the cosmos that is embodied in our selves fully as much as in anyone or anywhere else.
The only character who wears her religion on her sleeve (not mention her entire white wardrobe and turban) is a fanatical cultist (played humorlessly and with great force by Whoopie Goldberg). She is the only one who does not get to join in the moment at the end when the women come together (pictured at right) in sorrow and renewal.
So this is no endorsement of religion, but it is a deeply spiritual movie. The main way that spirituality shows is in the empathy of Shange and Perry for their characters and in the characters’ developing capacities to empathize with each other.
The movie is set in the present day, but the feeling of it took me right back to some of the most unvarnished, eloquent truth-telling of 1970s feminists: the single book that struck me most deeply then was the 1977 novel by Marilyn French, The Women’s Room. Men are not spared at all in this telling of how the world is. Nor should they be. In this movie the assumption is made that war, racism, and other hard experiences have damaged the men too — but they benefit from the culture that privileges them and and so have less incentive, although perhaps also less capacity (for whatever reasons), to respond in an empathic way. The saving of the women is on their own shoulders, and the saving of the world appears to be also, for there is little hope in the men.
There is at least one decent man in the movie, but this is not a movie about male renewal or hope. Nor need it be. The universal message is the same: the message to us men, and especially us white men, is that we will not find G*d and love in our selves until we see what responsibility is ours, and give empathy ourselves, and have our own epiphanies so that we come to love ourselves and others fiercely and well, and so find our own renewal and hope, in all humility. It is surely the illusion of control, the false promises of privilege that have led the men’s movement and male renewal to lag so far behind those of women in our time.
Men, come to this movie!