“Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys” is a lightly sermonizing and heavily moralizing interracial soap opera that leaves us briefly stirred, but ultimately unsure of what to take away from the film. Perry typically makes films that are set in Atlanta, have conspicuous and predictable moralistic themes, have pious undertones, cast mainly African Americans and credit himself in the title. The Family doesn’t diverge much from the pattern, except that this time he includes a few white characters in the foreground. The cast, on the whole, is spectacular. Almost every actor deeply stirs our sympathy. The plot and directing, on the other hand, though stimulating throughout (just as a teen gossip magazine is stimulating throughout), are artistically mediocre.
The film follows the intrigues and melodramas of two families, one white and one black, with an unlikely relationship. At the head of the former is Charlotte Cartwright (Kathy Bates), the obscenely wealthy matriarch who owns the controlling share of a successful Atlanta construction company. Charlotte has a longstanding friendship with the strong-spined and selfless African-American mother, Alice Pratt (Alfre Woodward), a paragon of Christian piety who owns and struggles to maintain a small family restaurant with her daughter Pam (Taraji P. Henson). Alice is endlessly sacrificial in working to mend the relationship between her daughters Andrea (Sanaa Lathan) and Pam. Andrea, through sleeping with Charlotte’s unscrupulous son William (Cole Hauser), climbs the ladder out of her family’s social class and develops a smug and denigrating attitude toward everyone associated with her past life, especially her sister and her construction-worker husband Chris (Rockmond Dunbar). Chris, an unrealistically oblivious cuckold and one of the few wholly good-hearted characters in the film, is eventually awarded sweet revenge and a ton of cash in accordance with the simple justice typical of Perry’s films.
No one escapes Perry’s justice in this film, with the many vicious characters meeting either death or precipitous falls from power and the virtuous characters rising to wealth and liberation. The least formulaic and most morally dubious reward of Perry’s justice comes to the devoted mother Alice, whose reward consists precisely in being liberated from her devotion to her children. Having worked steadfastly and lovingly for her children for so many years, she is now allowed to “live for herself,” selling her restaurant and driving off a millionaire in a 1950s vintage convertible to Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance.” Is that a pious message?
As this sketch may suggest, the plot consists almost solely in the sum of the busy and convoluted relationships of the characters. No character is consistent throughout. Every character changes significantly from beginning to end, and most have multiple faces throughout. There is, of course, much of interest here, but the film lacks any unifying themes, or any sign of some consistent underlying passion that inspired it, that might lend it artistic integrity. Perry timidly and briefly broaches a number of potentially interesting psychological themes, like Andrea’s insecurity and resentment over her unprivileged upbringing or the unnameable freedom that Charlotte futilely seeks from the power struggles of family and business life, but in the end we are not sure what to take away from the film. The film, lacking a core, quickly dissolves and leaves no lingering mark on our affections.
