I have always been of the mind that Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Color Purple is one of the low points of his career—a largely tone deaf attempt to prove his bone fides as a “serious” filmmaker that nevertheless saw him either watering down or simply eliminating the more troublesome aspects of Walker’s often-harrowing narrative in an effort to connect with the broadest audience imaginable. And yet, that film almost feels like a master class in subtlety and quiet dignity in comparison to filmmaker Blitz Bazawule’s attempt to bring the book’s long-running 2005 Broadway musical adaptation to the screen. What could have been a bold attempt to use the stylized format of the musical genre to explore the themes driving Walker’s often-harrowing and ultimately triumphant narrative instead plays as an ungainly mess that tosses all of the passion and struggle of the story out the window in order to make room for a bunch of musical numbers that, between the blandness of the material and the often-overwrought delivery, feel like a collection of American Idol auditions than anything else.
For those of you who have not experienced any of its previous permutations, The Color Purple tells a story that is set in rural Georgia that begins in the early 20th century and chronicles the often horrifying life of an African-American woman named Celie. When we first see her, she is a teenager (played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) who is about to give birth to her second child, both of them the product of rape at the hands of her abusive father, Alphonso (Deon Cole) who then subsequently takes them from her. One day, an equally monstrous farmer, known as Mister (Colman Domingo), comes calling to ask Alphonso for the hand of Celie’s beloved younger sister Nettie (Halle Bailey) in marriage but Alphonso convinces him to take Celie instead. Unwilling to stay in the same house alone with Alphonso, Nettie leaves with Celie but when she refuses the advances of Mister, she is barred from the house and vanishes, leaving Celie to endure a brutal existence that consists of little more than backbreaking labor punctuated by constant verbal abuse and the more-than-occasional beating.
Years pass and when we next see Celie (played as an adult by Fantasia Barrino), she has more or less resigned herself to her grim existence when she makes the acquaintance of two women who show her a potentially different way. The first is Sofia (Danielle Brooks), the brash and self-assertive wife of Mister’s son, Harpo (Corey Hawkins) who simply refuses to take crap from anyone, an attitude that will eventually lead to her downfall one day in a confrontation with the town’s white mayor and his equally odious wife. The second, and more significant, encounter arrives in the form of Shug Avery (Tarji P. Henson), a blues singer and Mister’s off-and-on lover who turns up at their home one day. Mister cruelly insists that Celie help nurse the ailing Shug back to health and over time, the two develop the closest thing to a genuinely loving relationship that Celie has experienced since the disappearance of Nettie. Emboldened by this friendship and a startling discovery involving her sister, Celie finds the strength to finally assert herself by standing up to Mister and attempting to live her life on her own terms.
The problem with the film is not the fact that Walker’s dark book has been transformed into a musical, typically that most heedless of screen genres—indeed, some of my very favorite musicals, such as Pennies from Heaven, All That Jazz and Cabaret, have mixed challenging themes and ideas with singing and dancing. No, the problem with The Color Purple is that it does it so badly. For starters, the film takes the things that made Walker’s book so memorable—chiefly the authorial voice that she evoked to tell the story, the notion of literacy as the key to Celie’s ability to break out of her bleak existence and discover a new world and the romance that develops between her and Shug—have either been greatly reduced or eliminated entirely. Instead, the film tries to recast the narrative as a broad but vague celebration of triumph over adversity that is so overdone with showbizzy touches that we never get any chance when we are able to truly identify with Celie’s suffering, either physical or emotional, on a recognizably human level. The need to infuse the material with shallow uplift hits its nadir in the film’s final section, which reworks the book’s ending in ways that never ring true and which I suspect will deeply offend those who read and were moved by the book.
Maybe this approach might have worked if the musical numbers had somehow clicked but none of them really work. The songs are largely shallow and add nothing of note to either the story or the characters singing them to ever justify their inclusion and the stagings are both overblown and underthought in ways that make them showstoppers in the worst sense of the word. Similarly, all of the actors have been directed to essentially play to the cheap seats throughout and while that approach may be a necessity on the stage, it is one that does not play nearly as well on film and ends up undercutting nearly all of the characters. For example, instead of seeing Celie as a timid and nearly broken soul in the early going, which would give her evolution as a person over the course of the story more impact, we get Barrino delivering her songs at full power right from the get-go, a move that pretty much wreaks havoc with her character arc. The only performance that comes close to clicking is the one delivered by Henson and that is because she is playing the one character whose outsized nature fits in with overscaled nature of the proceedings surrounding her.
Although not without its flaws—primarily in her depiction of virtually every male character of note as either a monster, a buffoon or some combination of the two—Walker’s version of The Color Purple remains a powerful and complex literary experience that earns all of the emotions that it conjures up. As bad as the Spielberg film was, it at least gave us the galvanizing performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey helped to give it the emotional grounding that filmmaker himself was unable to provide. This version, by comparison, simply lacks any sort of recognizable dramatic or emotional core to speak and winds up feeling like a disjointed series of musical numbers in search of a cohesive story for them to fit into. The result is a real letdown—a tale that is so determined to undercut its dramatic underpinnings in order to provide viewers with uplift that Celie’s struggle gets lost in the shuffles and when her moments of genuine transformation and redemption do occur, they hardly seem to register.