Doing Life

Man, this movie was excellent.

Not because it gave me every answer, but because it made me care enough to keep asking questions after it ended.

Tyler Perry's Doing Life is a really unique love story, but it is not built on fantasy. It is built around two fragile people carrying different kinds of hurt. Carousel has spent much of his life being judged by the worst thing attached to his name. Anika comes from a family of women who have learned—through experience—that loving a man often means eventually being left by one.

I could not say I understood one of them more than the other.

As a man who knows something about being released from prison and trying to move forward, I understood Carousel. I understood what it means for people to see where you have been before they are willing to see who you are. But I was also sympathetic to Anika. Her reluctance did not feel cruel or self-righteous. It felt inherited.

Anika is the baby of her family—the baby with a baby. Her mother and two older sisters are heartbroken women raising children without the men who helped create them. No man has withstood the storms within that family long enough to stay. Anika has therefore grown up surrounded by evidence that says love may begin with promises, but it ends with another woman having to hold everything together by herself.

She is not simply deciding whether she can trust Carousel. She is deciding whether she can risk believing something different from everything the women closest to her have lived.

A Different Type of Brother

Carousel is intelligent, artistic, observant, and genuinely goodhearted. Still, I did not trust him immediately. From my own experiences, I wondered whether the attention he showed Anika was purely game. Sometimes a man knows exactly what to say, exactly how to look at a woman, and exactly how to make an angle appear sincere.

The movie challenged that assumption.

Carousel does not merely tell Anika who he is. He repeatedly puts something real behind what he claims to feel. That is the difference between game and love: game performs; love sacrifices.

When the story places real danger and real consequences in front of him, Carousel shows his character through action. He steps in where very few men would. He takes chance after chance—not for access, not for applause, but for love. He stands on business. More importantly, he stands on love.

One of the movie's strongest contradictions is that the man society has labeled dangerous displays some of the clearest courage, restraint, and concern for another person. Doing Life does not ask us to pretend that his past does not matter. It asks whether a person's past should be the only thing the world ever permits him to become.

Sometimes good people get caught up in very bad situations. That does not automatically make them bad people, and it certainly does not make them a waste.

The Questions the Movie Left Behind

For as compelling as Carousel is, the movie leaves an important part of him unexplored.

We learn that he experienced abandonment, loss, and incarceration at a very young age. We are given pieces of the boy he used to be, but not enough to understand how that boy survived long enough to become this man. In a prison environment the film itself portrays as violent and predatory, how did Carousel preserve his intelligence, tenderness, creativity, and belief in love? Who helped shape him? What did all those years take from him?

I did not need the movie to explain every day of his life or answer every question. But I wanted more insight into the distance between the wounded child who entered the system and the thoughtful man we eventually meet. The film shows us who Carousel is now more clearly than it explains how he became that person.

That weakness did not make me care about him less. If anything, it made me want to understand him more.

What Stayed With Me

The emotion that remained after the movie ended was concern—concern for the fragile nature of both Carousel and Anika.

This is not a love story in which two perfectly healed people meet at the perfect time. Both of them are carrying histories capable of destroying what they are trying to build. Carousel is fighting against the identity the world assigned him. Anika is fighting against the expectation that every man eventually leaves. Their connection matters because neither one has any guarantee that love will be enough.

Tyler Perry does not make me choose which character deserves understanding. I relate to Carousel's desire to be seen as more than his past, and I sympathize with Anika's reluctance to surrender the emotional protection that her family history taught her to wear.

Both of them make sense. That is what makes their relationship feel vulnerable instead of manufactured.