Tyler Perry's Drill

Why Did I Get Married Too?

Directed by Tyler Perry

Runtime: 121 min.

LAST WEEK’S NEWS announcement that Tyler Perry’s next film would be an adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s landmark 1970s “choreopoem,” For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, was more exciting than the prospect of Why Did I Get Married Too?, the sequel to Perry’s 2008 hit Why Did I Get Married. Sequels are not news in Perry’s filmography: His career strategy has always been to piggyback his own formula. On stage, on film or on TV, Perry reissues and repackages his basic upliftment tales of black women who surmount their love troubles.

With Married Too?, Perry reunites his couples-retreat cast: Janet Jackson and Malik Yoba, Jill Jones and Lammon Rucker, Tasha Smith and Michael Jai White, plus Perry himself and Sharon Leal, this time vacationing in the Caribbean then bringing their therapy sessions home to Atlanta. It’s clear that Perry thinks differently about the feminist crisis that Shange outlined—primarily through the way his characters always resolve their issues. Perry’s embrace of Christianity implies a post-feminist, post-Black Muslim revanchism. It will be interesting to see if he encounters Shange’s anguish any differently than how his Obama-era marrieds approach their abiding issues of fidelity, vulnerability and trust.

Problem is: We know the drill.Too well.

Since Married Too? is not Perry’s first attempt at filmmaking, his reliance on formula becomes disconcerting. In fact, since the execrable Meet the Browns, Perry’s conventions have been unacceptable. (I’ll never forget an audience member at Meet the Browns sighing, “Is that all?”) At least some people in Perry’s core audience have had their expectations exhausted.They’re tired of seeing the same stories repackaged, even though he refuses to try anything new, refuses to risk improvement.

At this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, it was laughable when the mainstream Hollywood institution finally decided to acknowledge Perry’s eminence by inviting him to present an award—for Best Film Editing. Whether his first or most recent film, Perry has demonstrated no concept of good editing principals: out-of-focus close-ups may follow an over-lit medium shot; an exterior long-shot may precede a too-bright interior close-up.The black film experience hasn’t seen this kind of primitivism since Oscar Micheaux.There is also primitivism in the sitcom essence of Perry’s storytelling.That would suggest a deliberate aesthetic, but Perry’s sameyness implies no aesthetic.

It would be condescending to Perry’s audience and his subject matter to excuse his factory-made mediocrities as rustic folk art. The Why Did I Get Married? series isn’t insultingly artless like Chris Rock’s I Think I Love My Wife (or even Rock’s wretched documentary Good Hair), yet Perry has some distance to go before turning the issues he perceives in American life into art.

Hooking up with Ntozake Shange could mean that Perry has finally felt the need to up his game, to make art that reveals rather than exploits. He’s a multimillionaire, a mogul, a celebrity; it might not be too late for him to become a filmmaker, too.