Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor

Bantucinema
Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor 4/10
Released: March 29, 2013
By William Rivers

“Don’t cheat, or else you’ll get HIV”

I really don’t think Tyler Perry should be writing relationship movies. It’s not that I don’t respect him as a filmmaker or as an entertainer. I fully respect him as I respect any black man or woman who creates art. I simply feel that his films featuring family drama are great, but the ones focused on a single relationship the whole time, suffer from overdramaticized finger wagging.

Temptation is a film about many things. It is about how bad it is to cheat on your spouse. It is also about how getting married too soon can be a terrible choice. It is also about how a man should treat his wife as a queen and not forget her birthday. It could also be about not falling for the man who openly lies to you about his intensions because once you do, you will immediately spiral out of control and end up cursing at your mother, becoming addicted to drugs, getting HIV and dying alone and ugly. There are a lot of messages in this movie, and many of them contradict one another. Worse than that, they are all very forced.

Where should I begin?

Temptation stars Jurnee Smollet-Bell(as Judith), Lance Gross (Brice), and Robbie Jones (Harley). Judith and Harley were two down-home, southern kids who fell in love at an early age. They knew each other the better part of their lives and got married just in time to move to the big city. Brice soon becomes boring, (I guess) and because of this, Judith is increasingly tempted by Harley, a rich and handsome tech genius, akin to Mark Zuckerburg without the weird face. The problems with this film are not due to poor dialogue or poor direction (Although those aren’t the best either). The issues mainly come from the conflicting plot elements and overly extreme explanations for character choices.

One of the problems that Judith sees with her marriage is that her husband doesn’t stand up for her. They encounter some men who rudely cat-call her on the street, and Brice simply pulls her to the car telling her not to get upset. He seemed more worried that the men may have been armed than about defending his wife’s honor. Her answer to all of this is Harley, who turns into a psychotic gorilla, threatening a man who accidentally crashed into Judith on his bike. Judith was running without looking ahead of her, so it was her fault in the first place. After Harley attacks this man, Judith has to jump in and stop him. This is just one of a plethora of extremes Tyler Perry throws our way expecting us to understand and make the right choices. Yeah, her husband should stand up for her, but should he have gone straight to attacking innocent bicyclists? Later on, Harley continues to make passes at Judith in his home, and she calls him on his crap by pointing out that he has high heeled shoes and earrings left behind from previous female guests. She sees straight up and early on that he is a player who will say anything to get what he wants, and later she goes along with it anyway.

This woman is way too easily influenced. Harley tells her that sex should be spontaneous, so she immediately goes home and jumps her husband, hitting him in the face to try to arouse him. It is treated as a negative when he refuses to go along with this nonsense, as if he is boring because he doesn’t like getting smacked in the face out of nowhere. Later, when Harley literally sexually assaults her on a plane, she shoves him away screaming for help, he says “Now you can say it wasn’t your idea,” and then she goes ahead and has sex with him. Is this what Tyler Perry thinks is a good way to have sex? If Brice was boring, then what is Harley? We all know that Harley is the bad guy, but do we really? Throughout a good portion of the film, Brice seems to be the only one doing anything wrong as we see Judith and Harley have long conversations filled with real chemistry. It really isn’t until the end, when he gets her strung out on drugs and shoves Judith’s mother to the ground that the film actually expresses that Judith made the wrong choice. After one night with Harley, Judith is wearing dark makeup out of nowhere, has an uncaring demeanor and is now cursing at her mother and turning from the Lord! Since when does one night of infidelity totally change your personality?

I believe that the seminal issue here is that Tyler Perry likes having a number of characters to bounce ideas off of. Films like “Why Did I Get Married?” are very good because he has a lot of different relationships going on and a lot of different messages that pertain to each situation. Relationships are definitely complex and the right thing isn’t always what you’d expect. This film would have worked if there was one couple who had a boring marriage and the wife ended up cheating on her husband, but finding a man who treated her right and was exciting in all the right ways. It would have worked if there was also woman who fell for a man who was a player, and in doing this was enticed to do things she hadn’t previously been comfortable with and fell into a hole she couldn’t easily climb out of. These are both real situations that occur, and if done right, this film could have expressed them both properly. Instead we get a mashed up combination of the two that doesn’t make sense, and instead becomes almost offensive.

(Spoiler Alert! Not like you’d actually be missing out on a worthwhile experience) In the end, Judith is a sad and lonely woman. She now wears ugly plaid blazers and giant 80s secretary glasses. Through a confusing subplot that was supposed to be a twist, Harley gives Judith HIV, and she is seen buying medication from a now happily remarried Brice. She walks down the street in misery while the final credits role.

WHAT???

This movie shows us two men who are both not completely right for her, and a woman who listens to everybody right off the bat, causing her to lose her marriage, relationship with God, health and fashion sense basically after one night. What kind of screwed up message is that? These two had legitimate marital problems, but instead of even bringing up the possibility of forgiveness and marriage counseling, Tyler Perry just punishes her for falling for the trick that he even had us believing in for a while. No one in life is inherently good nor bad, but when your messages are so openly shoved down your viewer’s throats, you sort of have to pick some basic conventions that will express what you are trying to say with each character. Nobody ended up being likeable here. We didn’t even really feel happy for Brice in the end because his happiness was staged on top of Judith’s misery!

And why in all holy Hell is Kim Kardashian in this movie??

Temptation had too many ideas for two people to experience in one film. I would recommend this movie only to people who would like to laugh at the absurdity of it all, and at how quickly characters will give up on who they are inside. The only saving graces in this film are actors who know what they are doing, but are unfortunately stuck to read from a script that severely limits their talents, and a single scene of exposition that isn’t just somebody telling us about a character. At least, I was able to sit through it, so there’s that.