"Diary of a Mad Black Woman"

This is director Darren Grant's first feature, and it has a naive, amateurish feel -- that kind of first-picture awkwardness can sometimes be charming and energizing, but here it just feels hokey. (It's worth noting, though, that cinematographer David Claessen gives the picture a polished, professional look, and he captures Elise's effervescence beautifully.) "Diary" is intentionally broad -- by design, it's supposed to incite the audience to yell and whoop at the screen -- but it mushrooms into pure ridiculousness and still expects us to treat it seriously. Hardest to take is the way some very fine actors, among them Elise ("Beloved," "The Manchurian Candidate"), Harris (best known for "The Practice") and the great, little-seen Cicely Tyson (whose performance in "Sounder," more than 30 years ago, is the kind you never forget in a lifetime) are forced to plow through the movie's viscous religiosity, as opposed to just playing ordinary people in tough circumstances -- which is plenty for any actor to handle right there.

But as lousy as it is, "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" is weirdly fascinating. From a political standpoint, most secular white liberals don't like to think much about what religion means in black communities (or in white ones, for that matter). After last November, in particular, religion, or at least those nebulous wraiths known as "religious beliefs," became the great bugaboo of most of us on the left: We like our church and state very cleanly divided, for obvious reasons.

But churches aren't strictly religious organs -- they're communities, too, and although "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" overdoes its "Jesus is the answer" message, it does capture a sense of the cultural and moral conservatism (if not political conservatism) that these communities cling to. That conservatism is a fact of life in our country, and while some of us may not like it, denying its existence gets us nowhere.

"Diary of a Mad Black Woman" shows that conservatism in full force. But if Perry knows what his audience wants, and gives it to them in buckets, he at least has a sense of humor about it. In the guise of his character Madea (her name, incidentally, is an endearment truncated from "My dear" -- not a play on "Medea"), he delivers some sly zingers about the dangers of blind reliance on Scripture. At one point Madea (who has pendulous breasts and gray grandma hair and is very fond of the handgun she keeps in her handbag, which she brandishes gleefully with little prompting) launches into a tirade about how she tried to read the Bible once and had to put it down, because "Jesus talks too much."

As Madea, Perry is often hilarious (particularly in a scene where she and Helen wreak revenge on Charles by sawing every piece of furniture in his living room in half -- it may be broad, but it works). But Perry's sense of humor doesn't surface as often as it needs to. When Helen meets a nice new guy (Shemar Moore) and finds herself sexually attracted to him, she writes in her diary how lucky she is to have found a man who's "strong, beautiful, sensitive and Christian" -- this, after noting "Dear Diary, This man is FINE." We can't just take pleasure in the fact that Helen has found a nice guy who turns her on -- his attributes need to be spelled out for us in a dry laundry list.

If "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" turns out to be a hit with its intended audience, it may spawn a completely new genre. We already have infotainment. "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" may be the beginning of churchotainment, a genre that invites us to laugh, to cry, to feel and, ultimately, to accept God into our hearts. Still, if He does exist, He surely deserves a much better movie than this one. "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" is potent enough to make the lame walk and the blind see, if only in the mad rush for the Exit sign.

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