A Family That Preys Movie – Cast: Kathy Bates, Alfre Woodard, Tyler Perry Release: September 12, 2008 Director: Tyler Perry Genre: Drama, Romance Country: USA Stream now Tim’s rating: Bang for your Buck:
The second Tyler Perry film of 2008, The Family That Preys, and his fifth overall, is something of a standout – it’s one of the few films in his career not based on a play, and it’s the first of two. (so far) lacks so much as a whisper of comic relief – and yet somehow I find myself wanting to anoint it as quintessential Perry: this may have less to do with the film’s content, or even the execution, and more with his tone, because after the relatively straightforward Why Did I Get Married? and Meet the Browns, The Family That Preys is a return to the crazy Perry of yesteryear, the Perry who made such fearlessly weird and dysfunctional movies, the Perry who collided genres and tones without caring if it worked, along the way to deliver a frantic moral lesson immersed in social observation that made up in absolute sincerity what it lacked in insight or basic meaning.
A Family That Preys Movie
And even then, The Family That Preys is an odd duck: an attempt to condense everything about human experience into 109 minutes, with all the depth and wisdom of the man for whom screaming caricature Madea is the pinnacle of matriarchal authority. It’s a kind of terrible movie, but it’s the kind of terrible that I could watch all day and find something new about it every time: whatever its other sins, the film can’t be accused of wanting in ambition or scope , also in his story. content or style, and the enthusiasm with which Perry alternates subplots ensures that it is never, in the least, slow or boring.
The Family That Preys Movie Review And Ratings By Kids
The film opens with a prologue that introduces us to most of the important players: first of all, a couple of friends from the way back, diner owner Alice Pratt (Alfre Woodard) and multinational executive Charlotte Cartwright (Kathy Bates), and their children. Alice’s daughters are Pam (Taraji P. Henson) and Andrea (Sanaa Lathan), the latter of whom this day marries construction worker Chris (Rockmond Dunbar); Charlotte’s only offspring is William (Cole Hauser), whose strained relationship with his mother is shown when she points out that she would not be obliged to spend large sums of money on the wedding of her friend as her own flesh and blood with his current wife Jillian (KaDee Strickland).
The majority of the film takes place four years later, after Pam herself has married Chris’ friend and colleague, Ben (Perry himself), who are both working on a project being built by the company Cartwrights. Money is tight for Alice, and Pam does what she can to help, but while Andrea, currently working as a manager right under William, has a job that gives her and Chris an absurdly well-furnished home, she is clearly unwilling to help her family out in any significant way. And that’s as far as I can push the plot summary, because from here the whole building begins to hang in an inseparable nest of subplots and intrigues, with practically every new scene a whole new narrative thread is introduced. And this is part of what makes the movie so damn magical: it almost feels as if Perry, in the six months since Meet the Browns, has committed to taking every idea that occurred to him for a second and putting a place in it to be found in the new original story that he developed. So we end up with a film that tries to have something to say about parent-child relationships, marriage, class, race, corporate politics, religious beliefs, the bonds of female friendship and personal ambition in times of economic weakness.
And in part it has something to say about all this, but mostly the theme is swallowed up by the overwhelming melodrama of the play: whatever the film wants to say about the human experience, the theme of the film is that Andrea and William are both world-destroyingly awful people, which is one of the things that makes it so easy to call it far in advance that they are having an affair; in Perry’s world, evil attracts evil, as we have seen many times, but especially in Madea’s family reunion. Not only does this create an imbalance in the tone of the film, it’s even a stepchild of whatever message Perry was trying to convey, at times: one would expect that as the only film in the director’s canon starring white actors, The Family That Preys would have something insightful to say about race relations, except that the only person who would ever call attention to this fact is Andrea, who mentions it in one of her most bitchie moments in the entire picture (hell , maybe that’s Perry’s point) : that only hilariously awful people pay attention to racial differences). Whatever class argument the film makes falls apart for similar reasons: that, and the fact that, based on Pam and Alice’s “poor” lives, Perry at this point seems to have forgotten what poverty actually looks like.
On the other hand, even if the film slaloms through its enormous elaborate turns, on the way to landing in a nest of last-minute dramatic ass-kicking, including a colossally unfair revelation about a character that we should not care about. of ignorance that it still has something of the human about it late in the game: and what should not be surprising at this point, it has a lot to do with the cast, the best Perry had assembled at this point. Woodard, Bates, and Henson are all more often than not reliable (especially Woodard), Lathan does well with a semi-unplayable role, and Robin Givens nails a small but important role. The men are perhaps not so strangely on a consistent army as all the women; buy give or take an Idris Elba, Perry is usually not that interested in his male characters, even the ones he plays. Cole Hauser is especially bad, possibly because he is Cole Hauser, and so the second he appears on the screen and smiles his unctuous smile, we wait for the moment when he tries to set his mother on fire.
Tyler Perry Transforms: From Madea To Family Man
Admittedly, the presence of characters who are basically played as people does not make the ridiculous script any more reasonable; and most of The Family That Preys is arresting because it’s so over-aware, not because it’s convincing or affecting, though it’s almost certainly more appealing than the other Perry films which are also fascinating for how little they not work, in that it is not half so grotesque as his comedies; melodramatic drama works in a way that melodramatic drag-based farce does not.
The one exception, and the reason The Family That Preys is my favorite Perry movie at the point we’ve reached, is the dynamic between Alice and Charlotte. Woodard and Bates are two good actresses, but this is the one point in the film that does not depend only on the acting: Perry actually brought some sensitivity and a sense of fun to his cast of female relationships. They gossip, they keep quiet, they let secrets slip over time, and generally act like a couple of people who have known each other for 30 years and all the while have nothing but the highest respect for each other to have. At one point they go on a road trip, leaving the other characters and their crazy soap opera behind, and this is where the film sings: Woodard’s intelligent, careful kindness and Bates’ bouncy humanism click and give the film a beating heart and a feeling of life, and for just a little bit, the film tells about some real truths about friendship and longevity. It’s a little, but it’s something.
Not as much as if the film had lived up to its title and was about a family of serial cannibals, but something. The foam that flows through Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys is more than equal to the cubic footage of late-night soaps like Dallas, Dynasty and its offspring.
While it’s wonderful to see actresses as shamefully underworked as Woodard and Bates on the big screen, they can’t even make sense of [these] disjointed characters.
Watch Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys
The Family that Preys shows great progress in the filmmaking training of playwright-turned-filmmaker Tyler Perry. It’s also his soapiest film to date, an overwrought melodrama of sibling rivalry, infidelity, power play in the family business and terminal illness.
As usual, the bad guys are very bad and the good guys are very noble – until they get angry and their wives call.
Cruelly old-fashioned, undeniably entertaining, Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys is a glossy, twofold throwback to 1950s melodramas like Giant, those sources of prime-time soaps like Dallas and Dynasty.
Although sometimes the film flowed as one
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