Daddy's Little Girls

Movies seem to be just composed visual scenes we watch and have a day's talk about and then forget about like a dream, especially those that remain without sequels. Unlike songs with re-play value, movies are rather too long to re-watch, especially with the continuous production of new ones. Sometimes I fear that the world will some day run out of hardware space, terabytes are becoming a very miniscule space, but that's just my absurd thinking. 

Nonetheless, there are movies which quite appeal to the interests, concerns and meanings of people in ways which precisely or closely reflect their lives or clarify their misunderstandings or provoke their thoughts or denote and stroke their actual desires,  causing them to re-play the movies. I'd like to believe such appeals to movies, which entice re-playing, come to a small proportion of people who actually possess profound tastes to things or are prone to find depth in things. But, without that profound trait to people getting in the way, there are movies which are so blockbusting they are rightfully worth countless re-watch time and Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls is culturally one of them!

I've watched a number of Tyler Perry's productions; Madea, Diary of A Mad Black Woman, For Colored Girls, Good Deeds, Acrimony etc to Daddy's Little Girls, and it astounds me that Tyler Perry has written and directed these, of course with the help of his team but looking at the man himself I'd inevitably commend his depth and creativity to mold real and whole life situations into short impacting films. Tyler Perry's studios are exceptionally skilled at shaping culture and narratives to draw the mind far from illusive life perspectives depicted in the media industry today. They are the gem amongst granites which focuses on peculiarities which are of significant value to the global community. Personally, the question "name five of Tyler Perry's productions you've indulged yourself in" is an essential first date question to gauge whether I will like someone and take them seriously. Anyone that ticks that list is absolutely my type because I can be very sure they've got a noble perspective of life which is not falsely inflated by or renders them gullible or susceptible to the visuals exhibited and narratives shaped on television today.

Daddy's Little Girls is a movie I've watched over a hundred times since I first ran into it in 2012, five years post premiere. I was browsing through the movie's reviews recently on Google, sike! It must be that Google search engines led me to a poor panel because I do not think those reviews did the movie any justice.

Here is a young man (Monty) who got incarcerated on racially institutionalized false accusations of rape, and lost a good deal of his youthful life to being a convict. What's worse? In this tenure his three daughters lose out on fatherly love up until adolescent age, suffering under the dismal parenting style of an ill-spirited negligent mother and a drug dealing abusive step-father. This is a reality of the black child in America, children grow up without a father figure for numerous reasons of which Monty's girls makes one of them. Monty gets out of jail as an adult male, pursues a career as a mechanic to make ends meet and attempts to attain full custody of the children from their entitled but irresponsible mother to no avail. Monty figures he surely needs a side hustle for extra cash to afford a lawsuit, so one of Monty's clients, an assistant at a lawfirm, refers Monty to a lawyer she works for who needed a chauffeur, to which Monty gives in and starts the job driving her to court and to her dates with friends and with men as she was 'looking'. During one of his late driving duties Monty receives an emergency call that his compound section had caught fire and his daughters who had just moved in with him following their grandmother's funeral had been admitted to a hospital. Monty breaches his contract as a chauffeur and immediately makes a dramatic U-turn on duty and wooshes straight to the hospital where he finds his ex and her gangster boyfriend and his boys already there. On waiting on the doctor's report, the infuriated lawyer blasts into the hall-way quick pacing to Monty and scolds the man demanding him to take her home immediately before he loses his job, the doctor/social worker jumps back at this with a report which qualifies the children as physically fine but mentally traumatized to which Monty gets restrained from the children and full custody is granted to the mother. This scene sparked a loud dispute which almost got Monty rammed by his ex's gangster boyfriend's boys, but they then instead leave, Monty remains defeated in the hall-way. The lawyer has kept deafeningly quiet bearing witness to all of this ghetto drama in a hospital hall-way, Monty leaves and she follows and they drive to her home, to which mid-way she felt contrite and conceded to her dehumanzing behavior and further asks about his kids, marking the beginning of a lawsuit with her and the stirring of a love story. Here is an uptown woman who is clearly above Monty's league, she's gorgeous, sharp, academically successful, professionally established, office buildings, five star apartments, elevators and chauffeurs is the standard of her life, restaurants, prawns and classy friends is her lifestyle, but she falls in love with an ex convict blue colar mechanic from the hood.

The family oriented narrative is one thing in this film, but the unconventional love which unraveled is a whole other intriguing plot twist, making this film a cultural blockbuster and cultural shifter! The lawyer went on numerous high-end restaurant dates with men in her league but who just didn't quite intrigue or appeal to her, at some point she went on a match-made date which was organized by her friends with a man as egotistical as herself who kept placing demands in the restaurant on top of his lungs and lacked common courtesy and she just couldn't stand him, but Monty James seemed to have a gravitas which weighed and fitted nicely into her feminine bowl, although she was initially adamant to the idea of how fond she was growing of the man looking at their extensively dinstinct standards. On one night as they wrapped up on gathering the information logistics for gaining custody of Monty's children, they knocked off late, Monty offered to driver her home but casually took her to a questionable pub where she downed some shots and they danced and went home and came needle-eye close to making up but she had to throw up and sent Monty home. The following day she was questionably up-beat in the office her colleagues noticed and wondered what she'd been on, her friends at brunch picked it up too and assumed she'd had sex, and it knocked on her that she really liked Monty regardless of his standards. On that brunch she disclosed to her curious inquisitive friends that she was seeing someone, but couldn't disclose any further who it was until they figured out every man she'd ever encountered and they got to second-guessing the chauffeur, to which she admitted and shocked them and had them tilting their heads, frowning and advising her against it. Conventionally a rising lawyer can't date an ex convict, it's a standard which however doesn't have any negative implications or bearings on her career, just socially eye-bawling. Obviously being in love she got unsettled with her friend's jesting and judging of the man and walked away in annoyance. The movie then further demonstrates the ups and downs of their relationship together with the lawsuit as she was providing legal aid. It then ends with the lawyer ultimately showing up late at a final court case to assist Monty in gaining custody, to which with her defence he gained custody by the High Court of Law which was attended to even by most of Monty's community. His ex and her gangster boyfriend got ruled to incarceration in the same court same hour for possession of drugs and illegal arms, Monty and the lawyer kissed to that victory in the court and their love was cemented. 

This is the greatest of Tyler Perry's writings I really wonder what his script looks like. For me, indulging in this movie countless times shaped my perspective greatly especially in the love aspect, that thing has no boundaries and works different and in a billion different ways for different people. Mob normalcy and convention should never be the determinant for how one conducts their love life. People surely do not want to get caught up in the collateral damage ward of love but misfortunes happen everywhere like carnage happens on the road but that doesn't mean driving ought to stop, likewise it doesn't mean unconventional love ought to be discouraged solely in the basis of people baselessly assuming it is bound to fallout due to differences in standards. This is the narrative this film has shaped and ought to be brought back to screens, or better yet if Tyler Perry scripted a 16 years later sequel which reflects on and demonstrates the healthy relationship and family dynamics of a high earning woman who invested in her trustworthy mechanic husband's garage business which expanded to mainstream level and contrived him to pursue a major in business management or some high position such as the events which unfolded on Acrimony, that would impact the world today significantly! It'd shape a much greater narrative and improve dysfunctional relationship affairs which are due to unions of high earning women and low earning men.