“Divorce in the Black” Has a Hint of Silver Lining But Too Many Shades of Gray
SPOILER ALERT!!!
After months of buildup and a push from a friend, I really started to look forward to Tyler Perry’s latest Prime movie, Divorce in the Black. Like many of Perry’s movie fans, I drifted away from TPS as his television portfolio, rife with melodrama and predictable storylines, clashed with his initial avant-garde portrayals of nuanced professional Black Southern families- beyond church meetings and cookouts. This is the first Perry production I’ve watched since pre-screening Madea’s Homecoming (Netflix, 2022).
But the title of Perry’s latest was, I thought, unfortunate. It instantly begs the rhetorical question, “Is there a Divorce in the Red”? Why title it “in the black”, which corresponds to a financial term for financially prosperity? If the title was intended to be a clever pun, it failed and could have been more simply and appropro named DIVORCE, especially given the painfully recent high-profile divorces of the lead actors, Meagan Good and Cory Hardrict. Later, we discover that the title alludes to a bland line spoken by Good in a bank after an angry confrontation with her soon to be -ex.
The movie opens in a church and I had to fight the urge to stop watching, but, surprisingly, the action quickly built to a shockingly unsettling crescendo. The next 30 minutes pulled me in as the drama climbed and quickly branched into several authentically thrilling directions but then the 45 minute mark hit and mellowed out into a Lifetime-esque small town love affair that, frankly, was a little boring and jaggedly disconnected from the rugged and gripping emotional calisthenics of Act One.
Good’s acting is engaging, authentic and finally abandons the coquettish sex bomb smiles and giggles for a far more substantive portrayal of a mature-woman-in-transition. Hardrict’s performance as an unhinged, verbally violent, trailer park Black trash scum is terrifying and, frankly, watching for his next unstable move was exciting. Several of the actors seemed to struggle with the direction of their character dangerously skimming the lines of jerky emotional performances. I don’t fault them since the thematic feel of the movie changed direction several times.
Despite the strong acting, Perry seems to be afraid of exploring the rougher side of the Atlantan social mountain and appeared to dabble with several different concepts of the movie mid-way; at several points, it literally looks, feels, and musically sounds like a daytime soap opera, a made for tv movie circa 1980s, and a low-budget thriller. Finally Perry manages to reconnect the engine to the caboose and gets the movie back on track connecting the last 45 minutes to its beginning for a more cohesive dramatic conclusion.
However, Perry’s ability to balance drama, romance, hard-core profanity, and humor still remains shaky after all these years and he literally self-plagiarizes scenes from several of his earlier movies the way one adds extra icing to a slightly burnt cake. The sex scene is completely uninspired and poorly cut. It’s raunchy without romance, graphic without gratification and salacious without even a teeny bit of sensuality. Furthermore, the story can’t decide if it’s about woman’s independence, domestic abuse, or a violent thriller.
Perry again relies on the worn out inclusion of the ultra-devoted (not nosy) best friend, whose husband is often commanded to intervene in her friend’s divorce drama, the concerned (not nosy) preacher/father, and the new (unnecessary) love interest. It seems too difficult for Perry and to be fair, many other Hollywood writers and directors, to craft a story where a divorced woman doesn’t have to have a new man waiting in the wings.
Finally, I have to point out that the movie was marketed as a woman fighting for her marriage, which was incredibly misleading and intolerably unnecessary. Good’s character, Ava, starts out as an apologetic but committed wife then morphs into a violent femme-fatale, ready to kill to get her life back. Perry again, seemed afraid to simply say, “I’ve written an erotic thriller”, and market the film as such. The missed opportunity here is that it suggests that he believes his audience is still too immature or unready to accept Black actors as serious thespians without the prototypical melodrama their talent is often suffocated in. More worryingly, it begs the question, “Does Perry know that his audience expanded beyond the chitlin’ circuit (of which I was part) ages ago?”
Weak and ambiguous moral lessons in a thriller- which is what this movie turned out to be- are no substitution for a bold and clear story about a woman (re)discovering her entire self after marriage to a ruffian. Perry’s continued inclination to even include a “moral of the story” insults the intelligence of movie-lovers who don’t need to be spoon fed feel good ethics to justify the on-screen violence of an abusive marriage.
The aforementioned silver lining is this: Perry delivered a well-played thriller that addressed a serious topic, not of domestic violence, but of re-awakening after a terribly dreary time in one’s life. His unsteady approach to addressing adult situations reeks of Southern gentility when it needs a punch of New York red light district grit.
Had Perry been bolder in his cuts and fully fleshing out the Main Character, sans convenient assistance from other Characters, Good's character could have arced more quickly and smoothly showing us how a woman with promise ended up married to an uncouth creep without her having to self-explain it. A more courageous trust in his writing, subject matter, Characters and the audience might have made Divorce in the Black a blue medal winner instead of a silver medal second.
Divorce in the Black is now playing on Amazon Prime.
Grade C+
Score 3.9 out of 5
