'The Color Purple' briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

            Without getting too white about it, I’ll simply say The Color Purple as musical (and directed by an African-American) doesn’t have much on a Jewish guy working out the same affair. I don’t know whether author Alice Walker signed off on the turnaround of her Pulitzer Prize winning 1982 novel, but she’s most definitely cool with this new one, which takes the tale’s persistent anguish and attempts to fashion some kind of holiday escape from the extroversion of the story-to-song translation. Personally, despite finding the well-cut trailers absurdly moving, the troubling sum of this film, while forcefully acted and home to some fantastic theater talent, is underwhelming in pathos — I’m sorry but if your adapted musical can’t even top the singular performance (the wonderful juke joint sequence) of the original movie, then why bother?

When 2023’s Color Purple feels hymn-like or dreamlike, there’s a real, rapturous pulse beneath the direction of Blitz Bazawule in his second outing — but for the regular drama, or even just numbers requiring no dancing, no extravagance, this movie has jack shit on Steven Spielberg’s sense of gravity, composition and fitting the epic, despondent aspects of the novel to appropriately grand cinematic sweep. For sure, Colman Domingo is so good as Mister and looking uncannily similar to a young Danny Glover that he manages to top the 1985 turn. Corey Hawkins continues an auspicious career as a perfect Harpo and Taraji P. Henson is also pretty much the perfect choice for Shug Avery. Still in spite of very commendable work from Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks living and breathing Celie and Sophia respectively (they both, unsurprisingly, are the Broadway carryovers), there’s just so much emotional heavy lifting originally achieved through Whoopi Goldberg’s demeanor and Oprah Winfrey’s vigor. When you get to that dinner revelation and the long lost letters in Spielberg’s take, it feels so dearly earned, and here it’s “oh, already?” — turns out for as much as Steven was accused of softening the edges of Walker’s certainly more mature source material, this Color is pure plush with little tassels on the end, and so it turns out without illustrating the story’s pain properly, the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t so bright, and the tears don’t flow so easily, or at all.

You can’t cheat your way around this particular narrative’s deliberate oscillation between agony and exultation. Cutting out that Christmas visit is strange — what, too dark for the same day you ask your loyal audience to show up? It's especially weird considering the tales allows for making white people look even worse than you are but seriously, why does this feel just shy of “why don’t we turn 12 Years a Slave into a musical?” I’m curious, but mostly doubtful about whether the NAACP will have any words about this particular Color Purple — I guess the racist white lady, the one omitted here, wasn’t enough to offset the fact that there’s nothing inherently sinister about showing black on black violence onscreen, especially when its inextricably ingrained in the story. And considering all the “positive” characters like Harpo and Buster and Shug’s husband, most of the “reinforcement of negative stereotypes” boils down to the literal villain: an evil step-dad plus the dad of the evil step-dad — what gives, or gave, almost 40 years ago? Spielberg’s Purple is not faultless but something wholly heartrending.

Honestly, how is our juke joint moment here just lifeless outside of the big show? Maybe you shouldn’t be burying character and nuance when you could be fleshing out the novel’s illustration of the indispensable issues facing black women and the prejudices they encounter — I figured the bluesy song-and-dance could only extrapolate and empower the dramatic blueprint rather than hamper and reduce the narrative even further. Worst of all, not only is Barrino no match for Goldberg’s acts of uncontrollable meekness (Whoopi has an awkward cameo as midwife to her own former character’s birth), the soft-spoken Celie isn’t even revealed to us through narration, as would make sense given the epistolary nature of the story and the significance of the fractured correspondence between Netty and the Lord above — the songs should truly make sense her host of hardships, yet Celie is one of this adaptation's least considered characters. Then there’s the stage-to-screen stuff, apparently 13 songs were cut — killing our darlings are we? And this selection was the best? Of course there are the two original songs pining for an Oscar (indistinguishable to me, doesn’t really matter) but SORRY, Barbie’s got that wrapped up tight.

This so-called Bold New Take is certainly new, but it’s dearly lacking sonic resonance, strong sentiment or any kind of spectacle, silly as that sounds — given how naturally Bazawule made something phantasmal from scratch in The Burial of Kojo, it's a shame his essential, spiritual immediacy has been shrunken and scattered. There’s one set most of the movie, so where’s another 90 million dollars of Warner Brothers' money going? It’s so funny that the studio was asking for some real names like Beyoncé and Rihanna to join the cast as the budget grew, and the best they got was H.E.R., no disrespect — no amount of celebrity power could replicate the 1985 version’s cathartic breadth and bitter grace.