The Color Purple: Getting to an Awkwardly Joyous Being

Movie info via Rotten Tomatoes:

A story of love and resilience based on the novel and the Broadway musical, THE COLOR PURPLE is a decades-spanning tale of one woman’s journey to independence. Celie faces many hardships in her life, but ultimately finds extraordinary strength and hope in the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.

Review:

It’s hard to adapt the epistolary nature, the spare and frank tone of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel to the screen. Voice overs can only help up to a certain point. Letters of sorrow to a silent God don’t uplift well when recited on the screen. It can make the main character, Cellie Harris, and her circumstances look pathetic— a rape victim in an abusive marriage whose children are taken away from her, essentially a household slave with a black master.

The 1985 Steven Spielberg adaptation shifted the story- the tone was lightened, Hollywoodified, with a Quincy Jones score that was overbearing and uncomfortable. The lesbian romance between Cellie and Shrug Avery was scaled back to a PG-13 acceptable platonic crush. It was a great performance piece for its female stars Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, but a sterilized adaptation, that got lots of Oscar nominations but no wins once its deficiencies were exposed by critics.

A 2005 Broadway musical version based on both the novel and film got mixed reviews but met with the same fate as the Spielberg film— Tony acclaim but only one win. A 2015 stripped down version did moderately better, earning two Tonys.

Fantasia Barrino returns to the role in the latest screen adaptation. Danielle Brooks also reprised her Broadway role. Oprah, Spielberg, Jones provide producer links to the original film.

The big difference— this Color Purple is a more joyful adaptation that tries to reconcile contrary black styles of music— blues and gospel— into an uplifting synthesis of old and new. The Cellie- Shrug relationship is deepened with paternal overtones that seem a suitable replacement for the lesbian echoes of Walker’s book. it comes off as an adaptation that will resonate in a major way with black audiences and the African-American experience.

The new Color Purple is a singer’s movie with grand melodramatic sweep to match the powerful female voices. It has big song and dance numbers all strongly rooted in both the black experience and its cinematic equivalent. It reveres its story and character. Its joyousness is gripping and engaging.

Still this new adaptation remains a slippery thing to come to terms with. It hedges on Cellie’s dramatic journey by softening the atrocities she endures and encounters. The men are mostly cartoon villain flat or softened to be essentially an ideal echo of the women. The mixing of blues yields to an uneasy uplifting gospel with hints of blue notes. The two styles are never successfully melded. And some sudden changes of heart, mainly in the male characters, seem unearned. Still, it made me cry.