The Family That Preys (Louisiana Producers Film Source, Tyler Perry Enterprises, Lionsgate, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The first film my husband Charles and I watched on Lifetime last night was The Family That Preys (note the pun), a 2008 film and written and directed by Tyler Perry, who also plays the part of Ben, a minor character who’s the junior partner in a construction business one of the male leads, Chris Bennett (Rockmond Dunbar). They are actually direct employees of a big white family-owned developer led by Charlotte Cartwright (Kathy Bates, older but still with the authority and power we remember from her mid-1980’s performances) and her son William (Cole Hauser), but Chris in particular wants to start his own company and bid for jobs with uther developers. William is secretly having an affair with Chris’s wife Andrea (Sanaa Lathan), a Black woman who’s worked her way up in the company hierarchy, and she’s secretly banked more than $280,000 in money she’s received from William – though for some reason she’s put it in a joint account with both hers and Chris’s name on it. Chris discovers the existence of the account by accident when he shows up at their bank to make a cash withdrawal from the account he knows about and he’s told by the bank clerk that this otner account exists and has a six-figure balance.

While all this is going on, Andrea’s mother, Alice Pratt (Alfre Woodard, another name from the past who remained a quite talented and powerful actor), decides to accept the dare of her friend Robin (Kaira Whitehead) to go on a cross-country trip in a lime-green Cadillac convertible she’s just bought, she explains, because it matches her dress. They joke about traveling cross-country like Thelma and Louise (which is probably not such a great analogy considering how that film ended – though Charles joked that they were probably making the sequel, referencing my old joke that anybody who had seen a Republic serial could have figured out how to do a sequel to Thelma and Louise: just before their car went off the cliff, they jumped out of it), and they have a wonderful time together. They cruise (in both senses) at country bars and get hit on by heavy-set white guys, they go to a male strip club and they’re enjoying themselves until Robin tells Alice that she’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and it’s untreatable. In a grim late scene Robin has the mirrored door to her medicine cabinet covered with post-it stickers reminding her of things she needs to know and would otherwise forget, and after Robin dies Alice leads her funeral and decides to sell her diner (which, given the “faith-based” audience that is Tyler Perry’s fan base, is predictably titled “Wing and a Prayer” – though how Tyler Perry won a “faith-based” audience in the first place when his main star-making character was a Black drag queen named “Madea” is a mystery to me) and live on the road full-time.

William’s and Andrea’s affair is discovered by Abby (Robin Givens), a new financial officer Charlotte hired, who notices that he’s billing the company for the hotel room in which their trysts take place. Eventually the two are caught together making out at a company gala by William’s (white) wife Jillian (KaDee Strickland – with a name like “KaDee” in the credit list for a Tyler Perry movie you’d be forgiven if you assumed she were Black, but she’s white). Charlotte is philosophical at the news, stating that William’s late father had extra-relational partners in the same hotel room where William has been meeting Andrea. Chris gives Andrea a back-handed slap with such force he knocks her over – in Tyler Perry’s weird vision of the world we’re obviously supposed to approve – and he also drains Andrea’s secret account of its entire balance so he can use it as seed capital to start his own construction firm. William is also secretly plotting to force Chariotte to sell part of her shareholding in the company, which would reduce her from a majority to a minority owner and allow him to get the other board members to vote her out, but a deux ex machina emerges in the form of Nick (Sebastian Siegel), who’s currently homeless but was a stockbroker until he lost his job and his wife left him.

But fortunately Alice Pratt the diner owner (ya remember Alice Pratt the diner owner?) has befriended Nick and given him free food and a chance to clean up, and eventually Nick regains enough of his stockbroker chops that he locates the owners of a block of stock in Charlotte’s company and gets them to join the board, so it’s Charlotte who aces Willliam out of the firm and not the other way around. Andrea pleads with William to divorce his wife and marry her, but he signals his refusal by getting in his Porsche and driving away, and in the end Chris and Ben start their construction company, with Andrea presumably handling the business end. I had expected The Family That Preys to be more Lifetime-ish and less Hallmarky, and I resented the way we were first set up to like Andrea and then got told she was a villain, but overall it wasn’t a bad movie. It was certainly a capable piece of filmmaking (I’d never seen a Tyler Perry movie before), though it was also one of those movies in which the old pros, Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard, easily took the acting honors away from the younger cast members. It’s also one of these films, like Lifetime’s own productions Wrath and The Wrong High School Sweetheart, that contains a not so thinly veiled message against interracial relationships; in all three cases the Black woman protagonist gets in trouble when she gets romantically or sexually involved with a white man and is redeemed when she returns to a partner of her own race. The moment we see William Cartwright arm in arm with his plastic white wife, we know how forlorn Andrea’s hope was that he would leave her and marry Andrea: he was not going to show up to fancy dinner parties with a Black woman on his arm!