Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns
Directed by Tyler Perry
My Brother is an Only Child
Directed by Daniele Luchetti
at Lincoln Plaza Cinema
Imagine something called Federico Fellini’s Meet the Browns. Its value wouldn’t be in how it repeated ethnic caricatures but in Fellini’s felicitous way of using the camera and film rhythm to penetrate the character’s emotions. Remember the hopeful faces of the showgirls in Variety Lights? The small-town youths of I Vitelloni? The comical, loving family in Amarcord? Fellini’s high-art related to universal experience, an achievement that, this week, connects Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother is an Only Child to Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns.
Luchetti’s film continues the Italian tradition of movies that simultaneously explore family life and national politics. It contrasts two brothers from the tiny village Latina growing up in the 1960s. Accio (first played by Vittorio Emanuele Propizio) is an enthusiastic seminarian who then becomes infatuated with the local fascist party. Older brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio) tunes into the communist party. More than just competitive siblings, Accio (a nickname meaning “Bully”) and Manrico take different approaches to manhood. Each boy is romantically attracted to a style of behavior he finds intellectually satisfying. Their youthful enthusiasm defines Luchetti’s sometimes raucous, always spontaneous tone: Accio’s an uncontrollable rascal and Manrico has the gift of effortless charisma. Luchetti centers on the incorrigible one; but as the story progresses, the brothers’ behaviors converge in poignant, convincing ways.
The film tradition Luchetti evokes includes Fellini (the boy’s parents bicker but also display unique personalities) as well as Bertolucci (both brothers are entranced by the lovely, half-French Francesca played by Diane Fleri). Also discernible are nods to Bellocchio (the family’s fears for Accio’s sanity result in comic hostilities) and Pasolini (the boys’ politics reflect a compulsion similar to sexuality). Luchetti’s narrative spans a decade but does so concisely by building on those cinematic antecedents.
Another forerunner to My Brother is an Only Child is another brothers’ tale, the five-hour Italian epic The Best of Youth, which was written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, who co-authored this film with Luchetti (from a novel by Antonio Pennacchi). My Brother is like a speedboat version of The Best of Youth’s heavy freighter—that’s to suggest that this shorter film is primarily a comedy. Luchetti sees the episodes of family life and social progress in their comic entirety. The broken-down house the boys grow up in (from which Accio eventually liberates them to better digs) is, of course, a symbol for Italy itself. So there’s also some Pietro Germi in Luchetti’s homage.
As with The Best of Youth, Luchetti’s Romulus-and-Remus-plus-movie-history concept is a testament to how often Italy’s movie heritage got the national and spiritual history right. That’s why Luchetti can balance his two protagonists even though neither brother chooses the “correct” path (the romantic fool becomes a foolish zealot and vice versa). Elio Germano, as the adult Accio, grows and matures before our eyes. Physically, he ages from the young Robert Downey to Al Pacino, but Germano’s restless and avid temperament is an entirely original characterization. If Scamarcio’s leonine quality recalls the young Robbie Robertson, it fits with the role’s student-rebel phase, especially the scene where Manrico demands to “Defascistize” Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The mix of cue cards, pamphleteering and student clashes suggests a student-radical version of the opening scene in Visconti’s Senso.
Luchetti understands that the soul of Italy is found in its disparate people—its brothers—and particularly in its cinema tradition. Luchetti strides in the footpath of giants.
Tyler Perry is trying to blaze his own trail; that’s why he titles his movies with the same hubris as Fellini. But it’s troubling that by now—his fourth film as a director—Perry can’t find a cinematic tradition to respect or “defascistize.” Meet the Browns is so in-your-face—preachy and visually flat—that it’s only justification would have been a deliberate attempt to counter sitcom or melodrama conventions. Yet, Perry’s story of Brenda (Angela Bassett), Chicago single mother of three, stays within the familiar outline of ghetto troubles and Southern family reunion.
Ruthlessly alternating pathos with broad, profane family satire, Perry exceeds the boundaries of chitlin’ circuit theater. On screen, Brenda’s relatives the Browns (obese cousin Cora, rotund brother Leroy, alcoholic sister Vera) are outrageous countrified buffoons—not created African-American versions of commedia del arte but overwrought, overplayed wannabe crowd pleasers. (If there was a tradition for this, the 2000 Southern family comedy Kingdom Come already killed it.)
After the enjoyable Why Did I Get Married?, Meet the Browns is a woeful setback—especially alongside the new black-cast Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that Debbie Allen directs as a Tyler Perry farce but still brings out Tennessee Williams’ profound universality.
Has Tyler Perry ever seen anything by Tennessee Williams or Fellini? Perry’s primitive film style is no less arrogant than Michael Mann’s slickness, but the addition of earnestness and gospel-gangster homilies makes the lack of technique especially offensive. The appalling thing about Meet the Browns is that Perry writes and directs as if his audience had never seen a movie. Imagine Fellini’s Meet the Browns indeed.
Directed by Tyler Perry
My Brother is an Only Child
Directed by Daniele Luchetti
at Lincoln Plaza Cinema
Imagine something called Federico Fellini’s Meet the Browns. Its value wouldn’t be in how it repeated ethnic caricatures but in Fellini’s felicitous way of using the camera and film rhythm to penetrate the character’s emotions. Remember the hopeful faces of the showgirls in Variety Lights? The small-town youths of I Vitelloni? The comical, loving family in Amarcord? Fellini’s high-art related to universal experience, an achievement that, this week, connects Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother is an Only Child to Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns.
Luchetti’s film continues the Italian tradition of movies that simultaneously explore family life and national politics. It contrasts two brothers from the tiny village Latina growing up in the 1960s. Accio (first played by Vittorio Emanuele Propizio) is an enthusiastic seminarian who then becomes infatuated with the local fascist party. Older brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio) tunes into the communist party. More than just competitive siblings, Accio (a nickname meaning “Bully”) and Manrico take different approaches to manhood. Each boy is romantically attracted to a style of behavior he finds intellectually satisfying. Their youthful enthusiasm defines Luchetti’s sometimes raucous, always spontaneous tone: Accio’s an uncontrollable rascal and Manrico has the gift of effortless charisma. Luchetti centers on the incorrigible one; but as the story progresses, the brothers’ behaviors converge in poignant, convincing ways.
The film tradition Luchetti evokes includes Fellini (the boy’s parents bicker but also display unique personalities) as well as Bertolucci (both brothers are entranced by the lovely, half-French Francesca played by Diane Fleri). Also discernible are nods to Bellocchio (the family’s fears for Accio’s sanity result in comic hostilities) and Pasolini (the boys’ politics reflect a compulsion similar to sexuality). Luchetti’s narrative spans a decade but does so concisely by building on those cinematic antecedents.
Another forerunner to My Brother is an Only Child is another brothers’ tale, the five-hour Italian epic The Best of Youth, which was written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, who co-authored this film with Luchetti (from a novel by Antonio Pennacchi). My Brother is like a speedboat version of The Best of Youth’s heavy freighter—that’s to suggest that this shorter film is primarily a comedy. Luchetti sees the episodes of family life and social progress in their comic entirety. The broken-down house the boys grow up in (from which Accio eventually liberates them to better digs) is, of course, a symbol for Italy itself. So there’s also some Pietro Germi in Luchetti’s homage.
As with The Best of Youth, Luchetti’s Romulus-and-Remus-plus-movie-history concept is a testament to how often Italy’s movie heritage got the national and spiritual history right. That’s why Luchetti can balance his two protagonists even though neither brother chooses the “correct” path (the romantic fool becomes a foolish zealot and vice versa). Elio Germano, as the adult Accio, grows and matures before our eyes. Physically, he ages from the young Robert Downey to Al Pacino, but Germano’s restless and avid temperament is an entirely original characterization. If Scamarcio’s leonine quality recalls the young Robbie Robertson, it fits with the role’s student-rebel phase, especially the scene where Manrico demands to “Defascistize” Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The mix of cue cards, pamphleteering and student clashes suggests a student-radical version of the opening scene in Visconti’s Senso.
Luchetti understands that the soul of Italy is found in its disparate people—its brothers—and particularly in its cinema tradition. Luchetti strides in the footpath of giants.
Tyler Perry is trying to blaze his own trail; that’s why he titles his movies with the same hubris as Fellini. But it’s troubling that by now—his fourth film as a director—Perry can’t find a cinematic tradition to respect or “defascistize.” Meet the Browns is so in-your-face—preachy and visually flat—that it’s only justification would have been a deliberate attempt to counter sitcom or melodrama conventions. Yet, Perry’s story of Brenda (Angela Bassett), Chicago single mother of three, stays within the familiar outline of ghetto troubles and Southern family reunion.
Ruthlessly alternating pathos with broad, profane family satire, Perry exceeds the boundaries of chitlin’ circuit theater. On screen, Brenda’s relatives the Browns (obese cousin Cora, rotund brother Leroy, alcoholic sister Vera) are outrageous countrified buffoons—not created African-American versions of commedia del arte but overwrought, overplayed wannabe crowd pleasers. (If there was a tradition for this, the 2000 Southern family comedy Kingdom Come already killed it.)
After the enjoyable Why Did I Get Married?, Meet the Browns is a woeful setback—especially alongside the new black-cast Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that Debbie Allen directs as a Tyler Perry farce but still brings out Tennessee Williams’ profound universality.
Has Tyler Perry ever seen anything by Tennessee Williams or Fellini? Perry’s primitive film style is no less arrogant than Michael Mann’s slickness, but the addition of earnestness and gospel-gangster homilies makes the lack of technique especially offensive. The appalling thing about Meet the Browns is that Perry writes and directs as if his audience had never seen a movie. Imagine Fellini’s Meet the Browns indeed.
