When it was announced that a man
professionally known as Diddy would be starring on Broadway in A Raisin In
The Sun, it felt like a bad joke or the sort of comically preposterous
project that would be name-dropped in a showbiz satire to spoof our culture's
weakness for cheap gimmicks and the cult of celebrity. But Sean "Diddy" Combs
has made a career out of proving skeptics wrong through hard work, savvy,
chutzpah, and persistence. So it's an enormously pleasant surprise that Combs
holds his own opposite a cast studded with Tony Award nominees in the TV movie
adaptation of the Broadway production. It's even more surprising how well
Lorraine Hansberry's venerable fixture holds up. Sure, it's corny, dated, preachy,
stagy, and didactic, but it's also powerful, soulful, and graced with fine
performances, even from superstars better known for prancing around in shiny
suits than for delivering stirring monologues.
Phylicia Rashad stars as an
iron-willed, church-going widow who comes into $10,000 via her husband's life-insurance
policy. Her hard-drinking son Combs wants to use the money to start a liquor
store, while forward-thinking daughter Sanaa Lathan wants to use it to go to medical
school. But Rashad has big plans of her own.
As countless middle-school students
can attest, the conflicts here are ideological as well as personal. The actors
are burdened with having to represent abstract concepts as well as people:
Lathan represents the future with her Afrocentrism and fearless upward
trajectory, while Rashad symbolizes the tradition-bound past and its emphasis
on God and family. Yet the actors breathe passion, life, and most importantly,
anger into characters that could easily have come off as one-dimensional
conduits for conflicting viewpoints. Combs connects powerfully to his striver's
impotent rage and thwarted ambition, while Rashad carries the film as a beacon
of strength who holds her family together through sheer force of will. The
overstuffed plot machinery only begins to groan with the arrival of a miscast
John Stamos as Stuffy Q. Whiteman (or Carl Lindner), the anxious bigot who
offers the family money to refrain from moving into his neighborhood. At this
point, the otherwise-solid television movie stops being about people and
becomes a movie about integration. It's old-fashioned, but in the right hands,
Hansberry's trusty old warhorse still has a lot of juice.
Key features: A
standard-issue making-of documentary and a dull commentary by director Kenny
Leon.