Madea's Big Happy Family

Lionsgate | Release Date: April 22, 2011

4.9	USER SCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 35 Ratings

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ShiiraMay 18, 2011

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. This time the role-reversal stratagem isn't the stuff of science fiction, when in Sanaa Hamri's "Something New", a black female corporate executive and her friend help themselves to champagne flutes sitting atop a gold platter carried by the white help. "White Man's Burden", the 1995 "Twilight Zone"-like thriller, was full of such racially-oriented topsy-turviness, but the America that Kenya(Sanaa Lathan) lives in, isn't an alternative one. She belongs at that lavish engagement party, admiring the azaleas and lavender in the landscaped garden situated alongside the French-style mansion owned by a waspish old woman, who treats this black woman as an equal, without ceremony. Poles apart from the segregated world of Sirk's "Imitation of Life", in which a light-skinned black girl passes herself off as white in order to be accepted by a wider breadth of society, Kenya gains entrance into white circles, hair weave and all, because she's united through the fellowship of social class. Born into privilege, Kenya has no past to escape from, unlike Kimberly, who in this film, uses her elegance and sophistication as a weapon against the family she despises for being poor. Whereas Sarah Jane rejected her mother for being a "Negro", it's not skin color, but rather the perception that Shirley is too "ghetto" that rankles Kimberly. The real estate agent isn't at all ashamed of being black. It's the sort of black family she was born into that is the problem. Such elitism, in just about any other film, would be frowned upon in an instant. Of course, there are exceptions to any rule, and that's the case here, because this black woman's roots, in all honesty, gives credence to her revulsion. As many critics have pointed out in the past, this filmmaker's oeuvre is "Bamboozled" for real. In other words, a minstrel show. What sort of mother(Aunt Bea), whose daughter(Loretta) is undergoing a cancer exam, flirts shamelessly with the attending doctor and smokes pot in the hospital bathroom? What woman wouldn't want to distance herself from that? Loretta's impending death(which her high-maintenance daughter unfairly knows nothing about), in addition to Kimberly's horrible treatment of her husband, obscures the fact that she's no different from any other adult child who severs ties with the families they clash with.That's because we're too busy being manipulated by the filmmaker's misogynistic designs on womanhood. Tammy, the older sister, arguably, is even worse, since her nasty disposition can't be traced back to a childhood rape. And then there's Byron, a former drug dealer, who turns out to be Kimberly's son, not brother, involved with not one, but two mean-spirited women(his baby mama & his current girlfriend), both who have no humanizing qualities to speak of. Sadly enough, Lathan, so good in "Something New", plays a Kimberly-esque character in "The Family That Preys Together", which makes conspicuous the filmmaker's disposition regarding the woman as breadwinner in a marriage, since Andrea and Kimberly are portrayed as "strong" women in the worst possible sense of the word, emasculating their respective husbands to the brink of emotional sadism. In retrospect, "The Family That Preys Together" functions as as cynical response to "Something New", deconstructing Hamri's vision of the black woman by rejiggering them with the attributes of a man-eater. This filmmaker, estranges the empowered female from the audience with her unrelenting cruelty, inducing us into clamoring for something old like a housewife. Because he can count on the conservative nature of his base, Kimberly is demonized for her assimilation into polite white society, since higher education and upward mobility go against the grain of his fans' "keeping it real" mentality. With each new offering, the cultural war over African-American representation between black intellectuals and black evangelicals resumes itself. The scene involving Kimberly, in her capacity as a real estate agent, showing off property to a white couple before Madea interrupts the open house, is a typically polarizing moment. It signifies different things for different people. With Kimberly's back to the picture window, the moviegoer and the couple witnesses an old dilapidated car pull up in the driveway. Like she was shout of a cannon, Madea opens the rusty door and makes her way to the house. To his ardent supporters, watching Kimberly being put in her place by the grandmother with linebacker-like shoulders, satisfies their outrage that one of their own has the gall to move up the social hierarchy. But to the filmmaker's many high-profile detractors, the window is transformed into a movie screen when the niece stands in juxtaposition with Madea, as the mammy encroaches on the contemporary black woman like a specter from yesteryear, undoing the yeoman's work of female black filmmakers who have all tried to take the spook out of "spook".… Expand

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