Madea’s Family Reunion

Madea's Family Reunion (2006) delivers a good message through a faulty medium. The film begins as if it is a Woody Allen movie for African Americans. The first scene involves a posh apartment and three well dressed young women. In later scenes we encounter characters from differing social classes—a bus driver, two elderly retired people, a young woman trying to succeed in her own business. Despite this, the film offers an idealized, smooth, sometimes saccharine portrait of its characters and their lives. The wedding scene at the end of the film is difficult to swallow.

Set in Atlanta, Madea's Family Reunion focuses on a mother, Victoria, and her two daughters Lisa and Vanessa. Victoria is a haughty and scheming woman who uses her daughters to get what she wants. Lisa is about to marry a wealthy businessman who beats her and generally abuses her. When she confides in her mother about the abuse, the woman tells her she must put up with it. She believes that woman must accept their lot, and what comes with it, if they want to be comfortable and cared for. Vanessa is generally ignored by the mother—later in the film Vanessa reveals the abuse she suffered from one of her mother's several husbands, abuse the mother not only countenanced but arranged for.

Madea is the aunt of the mother. She is a loud, brash, domineering woman who takes foster children into her home and disciplines and loves them rigorously. She and her husband Uncle Joe are comical characters in a serious soap opera. Madea is full of energy and is the heart of the film. She is played in drag by the director Ryan Perry, who also plays Uncle Joe. Their comic shenanigans often seem out of place given the serious problems of the other characters, but without them the film would be much less entertaining than it is. Madea and Uncle Joe are both stereotypical characters—Madea is similar to Big Momma in the two Martin Lawrence films of that name, while in Barbershop (2002) portrayed several characters like Uncle Joe. White filmmakers have used black stereotypes for years, and it is interesting to see them in films by black directors. Barbershop was criticized by Jessie Jackson for its use of stereotypes he regarded as damaging. What ultimately prevents Madea's character from being overwhelmed by the stereotype she portrays is her strong positive character and the support she provides to Lisa and Vanessa.

Social responsibility and family unity are the message of this film. It suggests that a black matriarchy seeks to uphold positive social and moral standards and to defend women and children from the onslaughts of destructive irresponsible males. The matriarchy also resists the decline of values evident in contemporary society. In general, the women characters have been victimized by men in one way or another, while the men are either weak and foolish or brutal victimizers. Madea is the strong and positive woman in the film, while her husband Joe is a flatulent fool. Lisa's fiancé is rich and ruthless—he sees Lisa as just another possession. The one positive male character is the bus driver Brian, who falls in love with Vanessa. Because of her painful experiences in earlier relationships, she resists him. Lisa wants to abandon her fiancé but he threatens her, even threatens to kill her, and her mother insists that she stick with the engagement—her financial welfare depends on the marriage, for reasons the film details.

Events work themselves out as they usually do in this sort of film.

The heart of the film is a family reunion where the 90 year-old-matriarch of the family is upset when she sees her descendants gambling and dancing licentiously in skimpy clothes. Cicely Tison and Maya Angelou give moving speeches about family and social responsibility, upbraiding the family members for their errant ways. As Eleanor Ringel in the Atlanta Journal Constitution pointed out in her review. "Perry shares an agenda with Bill Cosby and Spike Lee: He wants young African-Americans to take responsibility for themselves. He has no patience for drugs, careless sex, guns, fists, sexually provocative behavior, or blaming everyone else for what you're doing to yourself." This is one of the film's central messages, but the speech that Tyson delivers, and Angelou's comments, and the family reunion itself, seem awkwardly placed in the film focused on the serious problems of Lisa and Vanessa. The film is episodic and consists of a number of loosely linked set pieces, the reunion is the prime example, but a farting episode involving Uncle Joe is another. The different parts of the film don't really fit together, it's schizophrenic in a sense, and although the film is entertaining to watch and, in the end, moving, especially Tison's speech, it is not successful. It is a loosely assembled. It as if Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy collaborated on a film and could never agree on what they wanted to do, so that each directed his own individual scenes.

Madea's Family Reunion is a sequel to Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2002). Both were directed and acted in by Ryan Perry, whose plays of the same titles served as the source for the films.