PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 2/25/05)


First-time screenwriter Tyler Perry knows his audience and they’ll surely get behind Diary of a Mad Black Woman. It’s easy to tell that people like a movie when they sit through it piping up “Amen sista!” and “Thank you Jesus!”

Perry made his fortune (he owns the 26-room mansion featured in this film) writing, directing and starring in traveling play productions in the Bible belt’s so called “chitlin circuit.” In the late 90’s, he championed a new wave of live entertainment for churchgoing folk, mixing hysterical melodrama, Sunday school sermonizing, broad sketch comedy and gospel music breaks by adding contemporary touches such as pot-smoking, penis jokes and Martin Lawrence-style fat lady drag. Fasten your seatbelts.

We begin in hysterics. Helen McCarter (Kimberly Elise, last seen in the Janet Leigh role for the new Manchurian Candidate) is the kind wife of Charles, a wealthy lawyer who treats her horribly. Charles decides to dump his wife, drags her kicking and screaming through their house, and hurls her out the door. In this feminist set-up it’s quite a surprise that the strong woman who coaches Helen out of her belly-of-the-whale period is a man in drag (Perry himself as Helen’s giant, gun-slinging grandmother Madea) reveling in In Living Color-style antics. Then Helen meets a gorgeous man who treats her kindly, falls in love and shares with us in voiceover how wonderful it is that he’s Christian. By this time we understand that every 10 minutes, the sobbing and fart jokes give way to a character solemnly reminding us that the way to handle a problem is to have Christ deal with it.

As preposterously awkward, naïve and contrived as this movie is, it’s still a curious sort of pleasure to witness—especially the gospel singing scenes (even the one where the preacher explains that Buddha and Muhammad ain’t where it’s at.) The people involved plainly have faith in the material and love for their audience. Perry and his team (the film is helmed by first-timer Darren Grant) take jaw-dropping leaps, almost always land on their asses and then bounce right back up and at ‘em. It’s a mighty messy gumbo. You may not convert, but you won’t be bored.

—Kevin Allison