Straw from writer and director Tyler Perry is an emotional gut punch about a mother pushed to the limit by life.
Straw succeeds in grabbing you hard and dragging you through Janiyah’s (Taraji P. Henson) overwhelming experiences on one fateful day. Taraji P. Henson pours raw heart and soul into this woman and is the core of the film.
Janiyah is broke. Her daughter (Gabrielle E Jackson) is ill and needs $40 for lunch money and to get her science fair project to the school on time. The landlord is threatening to evict her, her boss (Glynn Turman) has the empathy of a boa constrictor.
Janiyah is rattled, frazzled. All she wants to do is get her paycheck from the boa constrictor, pay her rent, and get $40 to her kid.
In her rush to do all that, she angers a cop in his brand new Mustang who threatens to find a legal way to kill her. Her car is impounded. She walks home in the rain to find all her belongings in the street including her daughter’s medicine and the science fair project.
She goes back to her boss and demands her paycheck. She gets it, but not in a way you’d expect. She ends up with a pistol in her hand, which she holds for the remainder of the movie. When she walks in the bank to cash her paycheck with a pistol and a flashing, beeping science project in a backpack, the bank calls the police.
She isn’t robbing the place, she just wants to cash her check. It doesn’t go well.
Two other women are crucial in the remainder of the story. The bank manager Nicole (Sherri Shepherd) is scared out of her wits, but does her best to help Janiyah communicate with the police and to keep her calm. Sherri Shepherd was wonderful in this. I’ve never seen her in anything but comedy before; she’s good with the drama.
Det. Raymond (Teyana Taylor) is the police negotiator speaking on the phone with Janiyah. Teyana Taylor is excellent. Three brilliant women performers hold this drama together.
A bank teller secretly live streams what’s happening inside as Janiyah explains her day to Det. Raymond. A crowd forms outside shouting, “Free Janiyah,” after they hear her story. Janiyah realizes she’s going to jail after this, but she refuses to go outside to surrender until the cop who threatened to kill her over a ding in his Mustang is sent away. Janiyah gets the kindhearted bank manager to agree to take care of her daughter while she’s in jail. The standoff lasts for 12 hours.
The bank manager, the detective, and the people protesting outside all get it. All the pain of being Black, being broke, being unsupported by anyone – they understand how it can break a person. The ones who don’t get it are the white FBI guys who want to go into the bank with guns blazing. It doesn’t end that way, but it does end with a heartbreaking twist.
This is the kind of movie you want to watch twice, because the twist is so unexpected. But when you think about it there were clues. Me, I want to go back and sift through the writing to clock how cleverly those clues were scattered in the story.
Like everything Tyler Perry does, Straw is emotionally over the top much of the time. But the performance from Taraji P. Henson is so visceral and touching you are right in it with her. If that was my life, I’d be emotionally over the top, too.
You can see this one on Netflix. Let me know what you thought of it if you watch it.