Bill Duke made a spectacular
transition from hulking character actor to big-screen filmmaker with the
impressive one-two punch of 1991's A Rage In Harlem—a flavorful adaptation
of a Chester Himes novel—and 1992's Deep Cover, a mesmerizing thriller that
combined the moral haze and sinister rhythms of classic film noir with a
nuanced critique of the hypocrisy and compromises of the war on drugs. Duke has
alternated between acting and filmmaking since then, but the abundant promise
of his first films has gone egregiously unfulfilled. Duke hits his directorial
nadir with the dire Christian message movie Not Easily Broken, a clunky adaptation of a novel
by celebrity super-pastor and "Prosperity Gospel" proponent T.D. Jakes. It's as
simplistic, reductive, and heavy-handed as Deep Cover was gloriously ambiguous.
Morris Chestnut (who also
produced) stars as a former college-baseball hotshot whose dreams of
major-league glory ended with a career-killing injury. Chestnut channels his
thwarted ambitions into coaching Little League, running a humble but successful
small business, and being a devoted, patient husband to evil shrew Taraji P.
Henson, a monomaniacal real-estate-selling machine. Chestnut desperately wants
to start a family, but his emasculating, career-crazed wife nixes his fantasies
of proud parenthood, apparently because she can't stand the idea of a
malevolent parasite living inside her womb rent-free. When Henson is seriously
injured in a car accident, her behavior goes from bad to worse, and her equally
evil, man-hating mother moves in to further torment Chestnut, who contemplates
cheating on his wife with the big-hearted mother (Maeve Quinlan) of one of his
Little Leaguers.
Like the simpatico films of
Tyler Perry, Not Easily Broken occupies a churchy, didactic universe of saintly,
too-good-to-be-true men and evil, soul-sucking women. Henson disparages
Chestnut's coaching career as bitterly as if he was molesting his young
charges, not lovingly mentoring them. Yet the film's "Can this marriage be
saved?" melodrama perversely asks audiences to root for the preservation of a fraying
bond between a nearly perfect man of boundless kindness and generosity, and his
hideous succubus of a wife. For a film shamelessly trumpeting the importance of
staying together through the hard times, Broken makes a disconcertingly
convincing case for divorce.