With his best cast ever, topped by Oscar winner Kathy Bates and the great Alfre Woodard, and his most cinematically polished production to date, "The Family That Preys" shows grand advances in the filmmaking education of playwright-turned-filmmaker Tyler Perry. It's also his soapiest film yet, an overwrought melodrama of sibling rivalry, infidelity, family business power plays and terminal illness.
And "Family" is yet another example of how Perry is his own worst enemy, raiding his cupboard of his popular but pandering stage plays and not bothering to script-doctor them for the screen. As sophisticated as the filmmaking becomes, Perry's scripts are still painfully unsophisticated grab-bags of melodramatic clichés, tired jokes and sermonizing.
Woodard and Bates are Atlanta matriarchs, single mothers and longtime friends. Alice (Woodard) runs a diner where she's raised the money to send spoiled daughter Andrea (Sanaa Lathan) to college, which her other daughter Pam (Taraji P. Henson) resents. Charlotte (Kathy Bates) is a construction mogul content to keep son William (Cole Hauser) under her thumb.
How close are the families? We meet them on Andrea's wedding day, held at Charlotte's expense at her vast antebellum mansion. Cut to four years later, and Andrea and her husband, Chris (Rockmund Dunbar), are working in Charlotte's construction firm, with Andrea now successful and resentful of a man she's grown ashamed of. There are troubles in William's marriage, too. Perry plays Pam's husband, Ben, Chris' brother -- with whom Chris wants to form a construction company, something we can tell is a very naive idea.
With all these stresses, all Charlotte wants to do is persuade Alice to take a road trip in a classic Cadillac convertible. If you saw "Bonneville" or "The Bucket List," that's going to sound familiar.
It's a film of soap-opera close-ups capturing the fabulous grooming and makeup of the gorgeous cast, of immaculate sets that don't look lived in, of B-unit road-trip shots of the Grand Canyon and the French Quarter. There's a lot of church in here, a choir number, a baptism "out West" plainly filmed in the Georgia mud.
Perry has created a franchise out of his name and his formula for reaching his audience. The steady improvements in his filmmaking skills are married to steady declines in the box-office take of his movies. He'll never be better than this if he doesn't swallow his pride and learn that newspaper and Hollywood phrase that has saved many a writer/director from himself -- "Get me rewrite!"
