Waiting for them in Alabama is a big bag of plot: Lacey has secretly married agri-scientist Conner (Eric Lively) but is too worried about Eileen’s fragile health to tell her that she married a white man. Friend and coworker Eileen (Anna Maria Horsford) recruits Madea to join her on a holiday trip to Alabama for a surprise visit to Eileen’s daughter Lacey (Tika Sumpter), since Lacey told pushy, meddling Eileen she’d be too busy to come home for Christmas. Madea (Perry) takes a job in an Atlanta department store to earn extra Christmas cash, but her not-having-it attitude with customers quickly gets her fired. See video: OWN Brings Tyler Perry’s and Oprah’s Winfrey’s Most Memorable Characters Together Instead, with “A Madea Christmas,” we get sporadic (but hearty) hilarity from Madea’s interactions with those around her, zippy moments that are weighed down by yet another sappy and melodramatic Perry screenplay. Madea is no Groucho Marx, granted, but if writer-director Tyler Perry would just let this ribald, outrageous sassy grandma loose for 90 minutes, he’d have a comedy triumph on his hands. There’s no ingénue, no love story, no non-comedic musical numbers, just 68 minutes of pure, anarchic brilliance. I want Madea to have her own “Duck Soup.”įans of the Marx Brothers fondly remember that 1933 comedy as the group’s finest and funniest, and one of the reasons it’s so great is because it’s the most unfiltered vehicle for Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo. That never happens in the movie, alas, but the sight of Madea in a fake North Pole makes me want to share my own Christmas wish: Santa and shooting down the dreams of bratty kids. The trailers for “A Madea Christmas” promise the sight of the tough-talking, no-nonsense protagonist working as a shopping mall Mrs.