Tyler Perry isn't a big help to 'Colored Girls'

It isn't surprising that Ntozake Shange's 1974 play, "for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf," remained unfilmed for so long. For starters, it lacks narrative, setting and concrete characters. Shange called it a "choreopoem," an apt description for what is essentially a series of free-verse monologues.

Who could film that? Perhaps someone blissfully unaware that Shange's mélange of beat poetry, street slang and identity politics had dated so badly. Perhaps someone so inherently middlebrow that he could transform experimental theater into a self-help manual. Yes, who else but Tyler Perry?

Perry's "For Colored Girls" is as amateurish as his previous nine films but possibly even more overwrought. He throws Shange's unconnected characters (and adds his own) into one New York City apartment building, making for a very crowded movie. Kimberly Elise plays an abused young mother; Thandie Newton, Tessa Thompson and Whoopi Goldberg are an unhappy family. On the periphery are a dance instructor (Anika Noni Rose), a nurse (Loretta Devine) and a building superintendent (Phylicia Rashad) who dispenses pearls of wisdom. Janet Jackson, in her third Perry movie, once again plays a miserable career woman.

Shange's overgrown thickets of language ("eyes rolling in my thighs, metal horses gnawing my womb") are borderline undeliverable; only singer Macy Gray, as a back-alley abortionist, finds the right rhythm. But Perry is so enamored with the psychobabble that he has Goldberg and Newton recite their monologues simultaneously, which only reminds us of the play this movie used to be. This is what art, made by the artless, looks like.