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'Not Easily Broken'

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BY RAFER GUZMÁN | rafer.guzman@newsday.com

3:05 PM EST, January 9, 2009

Meet Dave ( Morris Chestnut), a handsome, smart, athletic, sensitive man who in his spare time coaches a baseball team of underprivileged youth. For some reason, he's married to Clarice (Taraji P. Henson, of "Benjamin Button"), a self-centered, condescending, materalistic nag with a sub-zero libido and a poisonous mouth inherited from her harridan mother, Mary Clark (Jenifer Lewis).

One of these characters -- guess which? -- has some lessons to learn in "Not Easily Broken," a movie based on the novel by Bishop T.D. Jakes. With its mostly black cast, conspicuously upscale milieu and twin tenets of Christianity and self-help counseling, the movie resembles the seminar dramas of Tyler Perry ( "The Family That Preys"). But where Perry takes pains to spread foibles and flaws evenly among his characters, Jakes rains brimstone upon one particular segment of his audience: Women.

At the film's beginning, as the happy couple are being married by their sage old pastor ( Albert Hall, a seeming stand-in for Jakes), Dave assures us that Clarice was "the got-your-back kind of woman." But a decade down the road, Dave's dream of playing major-league baseball has been dashed by an injury, and Clarice's high-earning real-estate job has gone to her head. She orders Dave around like an errand boy, brushes off his amorous advances and considers him little more than arm-candy for her business functions.

When a car crash puts Clarice temporarily in a wheelchair, her mother moves in to help and, with a steady stream of verbal abuse and belittlement, successfully drives Dave from the house. No wonder Dave develops feelings for another woman (Maeve Quinlan, representing forbidden white fruit).

Directed by Bill Duke and written by Brian Bird, "Not Easily Broken" is a lopsided fable filled with female caricatures that are almost comical. Even the ones we only hear about from Dave's beleaguered friends sound like outrageous henpeckers and gold-diggers.

It turns out, though, that a woman can save any marriage with a little home cooking and extra sex. In the end Clarice is an easily tamed shrew: She just does what her pastor tells her.

(PG-13)