Blitz Bazawule’s big-screen adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple and its 2005 musical theater production (featuring a book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray) is basically echo-chamber karaoke. The film knows the words and tunes but, with rare exception, lacks the passion and the perspective to make them truly resonate.
Walker’s book charted the emotional, sexual, and implicitly political coming of age of an African-American girl named Celie, whose life in rural, early-20th-century Georgia is several tiers below hell. She’s borne two children by a man, Alphonso, who beats and rapes her, and whom she knows as her father. And then a barbaric farmer known as Mister comes calling. He has eyes for Celie’s sister, Nettie, but Alphonso pawns off Celie instead, women being, in the eyes of these men, chattel-like property with inarguable coital benefits.
The book is written in epistolary style, with Celie addressing an unseen God throughout. As the story goes on and Celie gains in self-confidence and means of expression, the language becomes richer and more assured. Literacy is one of the novel’s primary themes—the knowledge of both actual words and of the multifaceted human spirit (romantic and reverent, carnal and philosophical) that animates them. Out of this interplay comes liberation from the world’s various oppressions, be they via external persecutors or dejectedly self-imposed.
Fun stuff for a musical, in other words. And the minds behind this version of The Color Purple barely even try to turn the disparate approach to an arduous story to their advantage. It’s clear pretty early on, for one, that the filmmakers have tossed aside the literacy theme in favor of a more schematic sense of uplift that’s very much the saleable brand of producer Oprah Winfrey.
Celie, played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as a teenager and Fantasia Barrino as an adult, is in full soaring voice from her first appearance on screen, so there’s never a sense that she has any true challenges to transcend even with all the horrors visited upon her by the abusive hand of Mister (a hammy Colman Domingo) and others. This Celie is a hollow construct going through the motions of an oft-told tale as opposed to the fervently flesh-and-blood struggler of Walker’s book, in addition to Steven Spielberg’s divisive 1985 film adaptation.
Spielberg’s movie has come under fire for sanding down the novel’s edges. Yet it’s much more a radical reworking that uses classic Hollywood signifiers to foreground experiences (Black, queer, female) that popular American cinema often gives short shrift. For one, Celie’s early forced separation from Nettie has the charge of a Gish sisters-headlining melodrama directed by D.W. Griffith, and that at once ingenious and dubious figure is equally evident in the centerpiece sequence where Spielberg dynamically intercuts Celie’s reading of a treasure trove of her sister’s letters with Nettie’s harrowing experiences on a self-actualizing trip to Africa.
The transcendent finale of the original film, meanwhile, visually alludes to and subverts John Ford’s The Searchers, that knotty urtext for Spielberg’s generation of filmmakers. In doing so, it conjures an emotionally charged counterweight to a cultural oeuvre historically dominated by white straight men. Walker’s literacy theme, in the Spielbergian context, extends not only to words but to images, both their myriad complexities and their all-too-frequent myopias.
Whoopi Goldberg appears early on in this Color Purple, cameoing as a midwife attending to the character she played for Spielberg. It’s a clever touch and little else, lacking the cut-to-the-quick evocativeness that a nod to the past can bring forth in more adept hands. Like Mpasi and Barrino, most of the cast struggle to bring a grounding quality to the melodrama, inclining instead toward a to-the-rafters showiness that may work on the stage but which comes off cringingly exaggerated here. This sadly applies even to the Tony-nominated Danielle Brooks, reprising her role from the Broadway revival of the musical as the swaggering, eventually tragically humbled Sofia. Her showstopper number, “Hell No!,” is staged in such an uninspiring way that it comes off less as a liberatory anthem than a trivializing bit of girl-bossiness.
In what is probably an insurmountable issue with the stage show, the songs run the gamut from the innocuous to the atrocious; the less said about the would-be-exultant climactic number “Miss Celie’s Pants,” with its overelaborate choreography and shallowly faux-feminist lyrics (“Look who’s wearin’ the pants now”), the better. All the same, one of the excellent tunes written for Spielberg’s adaptation, “Ms. Celie’s Blues (Sister),” performed by the free-spirited singer Shug Avery, who unlocks Celie’s sensual and spiritual potential, works well enough here merely for its familiarity and its proficient rendering by Taraji P. Henson.
It’s the interactions between Shug and Celie where this Color Purple most comes to life. The scene in which Shug observes to Celie that “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it” still hits with the perfect mix of poetry and potency. And Bazawule and screenwriter Marcus Gardley find as brilliant a way as Spielberg and his screenwriter Menno Meyjes to visualize the erotic spark between the two women.
In a scene unique to this version of the story, Shug and Celie go to see The Flying Ace, an actual silent film from 1926, and one of the few surviving productions of the time with an all-African-American cast. As Shug and Celie watch the movie, they imagine themselves within it—the screen becoming both door and mirror as they sing and dance their way toward a liberating kiss. It’s an inspired way to engage with the ongoing debates about cinematic representation while still being fully uplifting and entertaining. And it’s one of the few times that Bazawule’s Color Purple stakes out bold new territory instead of fawningly emulating what came before.
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I cannot believe you voluntarily mentioned DW Griffith in a review of The Color Purple. There are so many dog whistles in this review. I don’t know what the right answer is for who among your staff should review a particular movie, and whether or not a film’s cultural specificity and context should play into those decisions to whatever extent, but I think you should not have reviewed this movie. I am mortified at how cruelly and casually dismissive you are of this version’s wholeheartedly earnest expressions of vulnerability, joy, and empowerment, expressed through forms of song and dance that you seem to have little prior knowledge of. That ignorance could be excusable if you would qualify your statements with an acknowledgment that you have blind spots relevant to this review, and that you might be missing something about how this particular vision might have been crafted with more than saleability in mind. I worry that prejudice informs both your taste and your tolerance level of how and to what extent Black people, particularly women, should perform trauma and catharsis.
You are free to disagree with the points made by the reviewer but to demand he should not have even reviewed it on the grounds which you hint at as being because he’s white and male and therefore cannot understand a film that foregrounds black women? No. That exemplifies the absurdity of standpoint theory. What next? Omnivores must not review films about vegans?
I didn’t demand anything, I said my opinion – I think he shouldn’t have reviewed it. I also acknowledged that I am not aware of the right way to determine who should or shouldn’t review a movie based on its subject matter. In general, I agree that white males are not all inherently incapable of understanding The Color Purple.
My issue is with this particular white male, who chose in this review of The Color Purple to reference the director of the most infamously racist movie in American history, The Birth of a Nation, for no reason having to do with this version. It’s a baffling inclusion, regardless of how much his use of it serves to highlight how much he loves Steven Spielberg’s version. He really couldn’t review this film without mentioning an infamous racist, especially when he didn’t condemn the racist in his review? This to me is enough to disqualify him from trust as a reader that he is reviewing in good faith.
He was also incredibly dismissive of two different wildly crowd-pleasing songs about women celebrating their transcendence of cycles of abuse and trauma. He seems to have a particular aversion to these songs, an aversion to the power of young Celie’s singing voice on dubious grounds, and also a general aversion to the lyrics and tone of the music that belies a lack of familiarity and comfort with musical theatre and gospel music. Though anecdotal evidence isn’t the strongest, the packed predominantly Black audience I watched this movie with was uproariously involved from start to finish, audibly crying and cheering and clapping during all the parts this reviewer maligned. There may be times where white people, male or otherwise, do not understand what they are missing if they are watching something outside of the norm of the content they consume and the environments they frequent. That is absolutely ok, as long as they can acknowledge the limitations of their expertise, or even recuse themselves from writing the review if they can see they are ill-equipped to acknowledge their biases.
To your point about omnivores, if they were the kind of omnivores who are always complaining about how loud and overbearing vegans are, then yes, I don’t think those omnivores should write reviews for movies about vegans, because the review would speak more to the personal grievance of the reviewer than to the merit of the movie.
We get it, you liked the movie. Time to draw a live under it and move on.
I did, you should check it out ;)
I have never read Alice Walker’s novel, or watched the musical … but recently decided to watch the Spielberg film in preparation for seeing this adaptation. And I was worried because the 1985 movie just doesn’t cohere in any way and didn’t move me, though it is genuinely sad and frustrating to watch Celie’s extensive suffering.
Every time the 1985 version digresses to give scenes to Mister or Sophia or Shug any scene not focused on Celie, it feels totally disconnected from any through-line. As if scenes were rotely carried over from the book but missing crucial context. It has good scenes, but it’s also hard to watch Goldberg’s passive character do very little other observe everyone else, or be passively kissed by Shug, or abused by Mister until taking some action in the last 10 minutes.
I wondered if they would solve the earlier adaptation’s problems and bring us into Celie’s internal struggle and make each relationship (Nettie, Mister, Shug, Soohia) feel organic and relevant to her character arc.
The original film fails in that regard. Celie never has a meaningful conversation with ANY of these characters in the 1985 film.
By the end of this powerful new film version, her arc with each of these characters carries quadruple the weight and meaning and poignancy than anything in the prior version.
It’s amazing how much more it all gels and feels genuine, understandable, instead of perplexing compared the original film. (Spoiler) When Shug marches into the church at the end of the Spielberg film, it’s actually staged in a preposterous ‘musical’ manner and feels disconnected to anything seen beforehand in the plot. It barely tracks that Shug had any parental baggage at all, and therefore the church musical number felt inorganic and hollow.
In this 2023 version, that same father-daughter scene is stripped of all the grandiosity, and feels genuine and relevant to Shug’s journey. This 2023 film has countless other clear improvements that justify this new imagining. It makes it clear that most of the book’s subtext was just cluelessly lost in the original translation from page to screen.
This review irks me by calling the new one hollow or less layered or less accomplished. It actually shows Hollywood didn’t know what to do with this story in its initial outing.
The claim that Celie doesn’t seem to go on as full a journey because she sings so powerfully from the start is ridiculous. Would you have her stutter and whisper what are clearly meant to be her own thoughts to dumb it down and create clear signposts for her growth? Our thought processes are no less loud and clear simply because we have room to grow. Why shouldn’t her voice be as loud and clear from start to finish. Her ability to take action is what changes, not her level of yearning.
I hope you take another look at the film a year from now, especially back to back with the 1985 version.