Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005)

    When it comes to 'close to home' drama, look no further than anything from Tyler Perry. When Tyler put 'Diary of a Mad Black Woman' to screen , he did so because the playhouses in Atlanta could no longer hold the audiences his plays were drawing in. 

     Tyler Perry was born Emmitt Perry, Jr. in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was beaten severely by his father, but his mother would take him to church every Sunday. It became a place of refuge for him and would often run there after his father had beaten him. When he was 16, Tyler changed his name to avoid any association with the man. Tyler later found out through DNA that  Emmitt Perry Sr. wasn't his father. He eventually learned that writing could be a form of therapy.  Before long he was writing dramas in the form of plays, in which the heroes of the stories were often heroines, that is female heroes and protagonists, as they were in his life growing up.  The legendary 'Madea' is said to be based on a cross between an auntie Tyler has in Texas and his grandmother. 

    Charles and Helen McCarter have a huge house as Charles is a successful lawyer. They have no children despite eighteen years of marriage.  When Helen finds out that Charles has been cheating on her and given this woman two kids, Charles throws Helen out of the house without giving her any money. Helen doesn't know where to go as her mother is in a nursing home, so the driver of the moving truck takes her to her grandmother Mabel Simmons, known as Madea, in the middle of the night. 

   The following morning Madea talks with her granddaughter trying to find out why Helen isn't at her own home, despite the impending divorce.  Helen says that the house is in Charles' name. Madea thinks its all baloney and takes Helen to her house to get some money. Every thing gets a little heated when Charles and the new woman come home when they are there. Madea takes a chainsaw to the couch to explain that Helen deserves half of everything in that house.

     Madea also brandishes a gun in front of Charles when he begins to try to touch Helen as to keep her from leaving with his money. And I've only seen 2 or 3 of Tyler's movies with Madea in them and she usually ends up in front of the same judge, with Madea's nephew Brian, played by Tyler Perry not in drag, as her defense lawyer so as to teach us that they way Madea chooses to get justice is not the way society goes about it.

    But I love all the ways Tyler puts the church in his movies. Madea has professed that she isn't a regular church goer but she goes for formal family reasons. The church ends up being a place of comfort and happiness as a break from their dramatic unhappiness.