Under the Radar: Taraji P. Henson

Taraji P. Henson got an Academy Award nomination for her supporting role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a year ago. But even then, most people didn't take her nomination seriously. They understood it to be some due recognition for a day player who's proven herself time and again in smaller roles -- as the pregnant prostitute in Hustle & Flow, for example. But nothing more.

Another role, however, something that came later than Henson's Oscar-nominated work as Brad Pitt's adoptive mother, proves this actress has some ridiculously serious chops.

Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself gives what is perhaps the most complete study of a black female lead in transition that has ever been filmed. And Henson, giving a superbly rich, thoroughly realized performance, carries the weight of this complicated movie -- a movie, mind you, that deals with family, and past trauma, and spirituality, and redemption with some of the same poetry and -- hell, I'll say it -- Negro Truth that I've found in the novels of Toni Morrison.

I kept asking myself: If this were not a Tyler Perry movie, would there have been more buzz about this performance during the season? A better question -- a much more subversive question (and fitting in a year when the first woman director and first African American screenwriter were honored by the Academy): If Perry's movie were about, say, a poor white woman working through her demons and not an attractive, middle-class black woman, would America give a damn?

Just wondering?