I finally watched Tyler Perry’s Straw and yes, a whole year after its release. Now I’ll be the first to admit that this is a little embarrassing for someone who reviews movies. But I’d deliberately put it off because I knew the emotional weight of the story would be difficult to sit through and it was. But what surprised me even more was what I found afterwards. I looked up the reviews and discovered that Straw holds a dismal critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, while many audience reactions were just as unforgiving. I couldn’t reconcile those scores with the film I had just watched.
If like me, you left watching this movie because of the emotional aspect of it. The story revolves around a single mother who is fighting for the survival of herself and her sick daughter. Janiyah Wilkinson played by Taraji P. Henson suffers a devastating personal loss before reaching a complete emotional breaking point. It’s a story about grief, poverty, trauma and survival. But above all that, it’s a story that seeks empathy and compassion. Yet so much of the conversation surrounding the film seemed to lack exactly that.
For me, Henson delivers one of the most emotionally raw performances of her career followed by Sherri Shepherd who is equally compelling. Together, they bring humanity to a story that could have easily slipped into melodrama. Instead, they made me feel every moment of it. Reading many of the reviews left me with an uncomfortable yet very relevant question. Have we become so quick to judge that we’ve forgotten how to empathise with the plight of others? And I couldn’t help wondering whether the conversation around this film might have been different had different actresses led the cast.
Honestly. I don’t know the answer to that question. But what I do know is that Straw left me thinking far more about the people watching it than the film itself. If we can watch a story about unimaginable loss and relentless struggle and walk away without compassion, perhaps the most troubling thing isn’t the movie.
Perhaps it’s what that says about humanity.
