Forty years on, Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Color Purple stands as a landmark of American fiction. The novel has been reconceived, with varying success, as a movie (by Steven Spielberg in 1985) and a Broadway musical (2005). The stage production was revived in 2015 and has now spawned a film version.
The Color Purple (opening Christmas Day) is engaging musical entertainment, grounded in a slowly bending story arc of female empowerment. That’s a combination that will find favor with many moviegoers — though they will have to be forgiving of condensed and occasionally confusing storytelling, oddly abrupt transitions and a surfeit of song-and-dance sequences that land with little impact.
The new movie will reach a larger audience than the stage musicals did (including touring companies), an unassailable fact that doubles as economic justification. More important, dear reader, is your relationship to Walker’s painful, joyous saga of resolute Southern Black women in the first half of the 20th century, and your opinion of the stage musical. How gritty, or glossy, do you like it?
As the movie opens in 1909, Celie and her sharp, protective sister Nettie are cheerful and pragmatic teenagers in rural Georgia. Their abusive father has impregnated Celie twice, given away the babies and now sells her to Mister (Colman Domingo), a brutal, charming older farmer who caps his villainy by assaulting Nettie and chasing her away at gunpoint.
As the years roll by without any news of her sister, Celie (Fantasia Barrino, displaying terrific range) doesn’t rebel against her miserable situation. Fortunately, two strong women come into her circumscribed world and rattle her perspective. The liberated blues belter Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), Mister’s onetime lover, settles under their roof for a few days, long enough to kindle a spark with Celie. The fearless Sofia (Danielle Brooks), who marries Mister’s son Harpo, announces her independence the moment she hits the screen and carves it in stone with the foot-stomping anthem “Hell No!”
The first challenge of adapting The Color Purple — as with any story that involves subjugation and domestic violence — is portraying the characters’ suffering without either glorifying (i.e., wallowing in it) or cheapening it. That’s an especially tough tone to nail in a musical, but director Blitz Bazawule (co-director of Beyoncé’s Black Is King) succeeds in making us feel the sting of Mister’s slaps and blows without robbing Celie of our respect.
