Large & Facing Charges, Madea Returns in Rare, Gun-Totin' Form

Take Madea out of a Madea film, and you have straight-forward melodrama. Minus the super-sized, sharp-tongued incendiary matriarch, played in drag by Tyler Perry, "Madea Goes to Jail" is a decently made weeper, with the familiar cast of characters from Perry's immensely successful stage plays and movies: betrayed spouses, fallen women, men struggling to do right and conniving, social-climbing villains in very fine threads.

But add Madea into the mix, and Perry's dramas take a strange, postmodern twist, mixing genera and tone and leaving reality in uncertain circumstances. In the newest outing, a big-hearted prosecutor (Derek Luke) struggles to save an old friend (Keisha Knight Pulliam) from life on the streets, only to be thwarted by his jealous fiancee (Ion Overman). Madea's perennial struggles with the law grow more serious and she finds herself doing hard time. Unless good wins out in the end . . .

"Madea Goes to Jail" is both slapstick and social drama, and it is certainly the most confident mix of the two that Perry has managed to achieve with this particular part of his vast media franchise (he also produces the television series "House of Payne" and "Meet the Browns").

When Perry released "Madea's Family Reunion" on film in 2006, he muted the character of his buxom and brawling alter ego. In his stage productions (available on video), Madea totes a gun and smokes dope, and isn't beyond speeding off before paying for a tank of gas. She lives by her own rules, even as she enforces the usual ones for everyone else.

In "Family Reunion" much of that was kept under wraps, and she emerged as a more straightforward, strong-willed maternal figure. She not only quoted "The Color Purple" ("I loves Harpo," she says to a bewildered schoolboy bully, "but I'll kill him dead 'fo I let him beat me") but was basically trapped in its ethical world. An appearance by Maya Angelou, for an inspirational lesson on the importance of family and tradition, sealed the connection. This Madea had been tamed for wider consumption.

In "Madea Goes to Jail," Perry lets Madea be Madea, and the results are more satisfying if only because they are so unpredictable. The gun is back, used to clear a house full of partyers who descend on her home after she's nabbed for speeding and fighting with "the popo." And Uncle Joe is back, too, toking on joint and later a bong, straight through his plastic oxygen tubes, and much to the peril of everyone in the vicinity.

But it's not these small transgressive details that liberate Madea. Her contrarian personality is also unchained, or perhaps unhinged, which makes for a very odd and weirdly compelling bit of whiplash every time the story cuts from its serious plot threads to its Madea antics.

When Perry moves a title from stage to the screen, he bumps his characters up a few notches on the social ladder. The DVD of the stage production of "Madea Goes to Prison," which bears very little relation to the film version, was a working class-drama, and its leading men were prison guards. In the movie, they're lawyers, moving up through the ranks in the Atlanta prosecutor's office.

From cheating spouses we've moved on to abusive pimps, strung-out prostitutes and a prosecutor willing to trump up charges and corrupt the system just to keep her man. As the narrative's social extremes grow wider, so too the melodrama. There's more at stake. People fall from higher places, and it's a long way to the bottom.

The class undercurrents are better focused. In his stage productions, career women take it on the chin. "You got to cook and clean and wash everything," an older woman tells a younger one, who is studying to get a better-paying job, in one of Perry's earlier dramas. Professional women aren't just prone to cheating, but stealing other women's men, as is the evil hotel manager in "Madea's Class Reunion." They are a suspect class.

In the new film, as in the film version of "Family Reunion," the evil that women do becomes more complex, more Machiavellian, and the women are more ready to use the system against their brothers and sisters. It's a relief, in a way, to see women guilty of real crimes, not just of wanting to get ahead in the world, which is a strange tic of Perry's plays.

Like most of Perry's work, the new film is set in a deeply traditional, Christian framework. Forgiveness is the central message of a Madea story, and it remains the central message of this film. But Madea is a destabilizing force in this world, a traditional woman who gets to the same place as her friends and family, but by wildly different means. She can deliver a sermon with the best of them, but she's not a churchgoer. She serves a higher role than that, speaking up with an atavistic voice against the system, representing the willingness to fight, the cheek that won't be turned, even if, in the end, she comes down on the side of the angels.

In earlier outings of Madea, you had the sense that Perry was struggling to find a coherent dramatic container for a diverse collection of deliciously incompatible characters, with Madea at the top of the list. Onstage, musical numbers helped smooth over the dissonant clash of seriousness and wisecracking, drama and cliche. In his new film, he simply stops trying to contain the inconsistencies, and in so doing, he taps into a long history of comic characters who defy social order only to better serve it. Madea is like Beaumarchais's Figaro, or America's greatest cross-dressing provocateur, Bugs Bunny.

Playing opposite her is Dr. Phil, one of many cameos (Al Sharpton, Tom Joyner, the ladies from "The View") in the new film and the best of them. Madea leaves him as befuddled as Elmer Fudd peering down a rabbit hole.

Madea does indeed go to jail in "Madea Goes to Jail." And while there she reluctantly goes to group meetings with a Christian counselor.

"Do I have to listen to all this melodrama?" she asks, clearly on her last nerve as a motley group of wounded women tell their sad stories.

She does, because in some strange, alchemical way, Madea is the reason -- the generative, leavening and balancing mechanism -- for the melodrama in the first place. That Perry puts the question in her mouth suggests that he finally understands the inner workings of a Madea drama, and that self-consciousness makes this the best of them.

Madea Goes to Jail (103 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG for mature thematic material, drug content, some violence and sexual situations.