Movie Review
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Not Easily Broken (2009)</font size><font size="4">
Under the Microscope: A Marriage Sorely Tested</font size></center>
Morris Chestnut and Taraji P. Henson in "Not Easily Broken." Ron Phillips/Screen Gems
The New York Times
By A. O. SCOTT
January 9, 2009
“Not Easily Broken,” a melodrama of marital difficulty directed by Bill Duke, is based on a novel by T. D. Jakes, pastor of the Potter’s House megachurch in Dallas and a powerhouse of that ever-expanding zone of American life in which religion, therapy and popular culture intersect. “I don’t want to go all Oprah on you,” a character says at one point, but Mr. Jakes is doing a version of just that, advancing a more overtly Christian, and more frankly patriarchal, version of Oprah Winfrey’s message of empathy, resilience and forgiveness.
Though Mr. Jakes has a small role in “Not Easily Broken” (as well as several opening-title credits, including producer), his real on-screen surrogate is Albert Hall, who plays a serious and soft-spoken Los Angeles minister. Among his flock are Dave and Clarice Johnson, a couple whose marriage is sorely, somewhat predictably and fairly realistically tested by an assortment of internal and external stresses.
Clarice (Taraji P. Henson) sells real estate, and Dave (Morris Chestnut) is a contractor whose youthful dreams of a professional baseball career were wrecked by an injury. Their slow drift apart is accelerated by a car accident, the specter of infidelity and a host of other complications, not the least of which is the presence of Clarice’s bitter, interfering, emasculating mother (Jenifer Lewis).
In one of his intermittent bouts of voice-over narration, Dave muses that women no longer regard men as heroes, and that men don’t see themselves that way either, a situation he describes as “the world turned upside down.” Though he declines to identify the cause of that inversion, “Not Easily Broken” puts a big share of the blame for the trouble in Dave’s house on his mother-in-law and his wife.
Ms. Henson is a wonderful actress, capable of moving from tart to tender, from manic to maternal in the course of a single scene, and she gives warmth and credibility to a role that sometimes edges close to caricature. (Ms. Lewis, for her part, has a fine time embodying an archetype as old as the Flintstones.)
Clarice is ambitious, materialistic, undermining of her husband’s pride and unwilling to give him what he wants most, which is a child. He compensates by coaching Little League, which gives him a chance to hang out with his buddies, a charming, amoral ladies’ man (Eddie Cibrian) and a motor-mouth, hyper-emotional joker (Kevin Hart) who serves as an all-around comic sidekick and who provides some laughs along with the suds and the tears.
The busy story line proceeds both by random unpredictability and by clumsy foreshadowing, introducing characters whose purpose is to illuminate various aspects of Dave’s strong, quiet decency. Darnell (Wood Harris) is an ex-convict whose life of irresponsibility and dissolution is presented as a stark and pointed contrast to Dave’s. Julie (Maeve Quinlan) is a single mother and a physical therapist whose friendship with Dave causes some easily foreseen trouble.
“It’s not because she’s a white woman,” a member of the audience remarked to her companion at the screening I attended. “It’s because she’s the other woman.”
Race is hardly an afterthought or an irrelevancy in “Not Easily Broken,” but the movie’s racial themes are understated rather than emphatic. It lives neither in a post-racial, utopian America nor in the kind of Balkanized hell imagined in a movie like “Crash,” but rather in a simplified and sentimentalized version of the real world.
This does not make it a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. Mr. Duke’s filmmaking is functional at best, and the extreme shifts in emotional tone — especially a late and disastrous swerve into tragedy — are handled clumsily in Brian Bird’s script. Yet “Not Easily Broken” is not easily dismissed. For one thing, the cast is excellent, and for another, its intentions are serious and generous.
This is the kind of picture that will probably meet with critical indifference, a response the distributors either anticipated or courted with late and scarce press screenings. Still it is worth comparing “Not Easily Broken” with another, much-written-about film about a marriage in crisis, Sam Mendes’s “Revolutionary Road,” which has energetically solicited the admiration of reviewers and awards-giving organizations. That movie, it seems to me, is fatally compromised by pretension and bad faith, by its refusal to engage with the lives of its characters other than by means of a secondhand literary conceit and a set of unexamined and dubious sociological assumptions.
“Not Easily Broken” certainly has its own, fairly transparent, ideological agenda, but is nonetheless a thousand times more honest, and more humane, than Mr. Mendes’s preening work of ersatz art. Many more people are likely to see Mr. Duke’s film, and to find it moving, edifying and even useful. That’s not everything, of course. But it’s not nothing either.
“Not Easily Broken” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some profanity and sexual references and situations.
NOT EASILY BROKEN
Opens on Friday, January 9, 2009, nationwide.
Directed by Bill Duke; written by Brian Bird, based on the book by T. D. Jakes; director of photography, Geary McLeod; edited by Josh Rifkin; music by Kurt Farquhar; production designer, Cecil Gentry; produced by Mr. Duke, Mr. Jakes and Curtis Wallace; released by TriStar Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes.
WITH: Morris Chestnut (Dave Johnson), Taraji P. Henson (Clarice Johnson), Maeve Quinlan (Julie Sawyer), Kevin Hart (Tree), Wood Harris (Darnell), Albert Hall (Bishop Wilkes), Eddie Cibrian (Brock Houseman), Jenifer Lewis (Mary Clark) and T. D. Jakes (Allen).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/movies/09brok.html