THE COLOR PURPLE (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Color Purple, Warner Bros. Pictures

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | December 23, 2023

The thinking behind The Color Purple, a musical adaptation of Alice Walker's 1982 novel, is odd, to put it mildly. Whether or not the stage version of this material worked is for others to parse, but the movie adaptation suggests the entire idea simply might have been a bad one.

For one thing, the novel was already adapted for the screen in 1985 by Steven Spielberg (who serves as a producer here, along with that film's co-star Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones, for those who care about such things). Say what you will about Spielberg's tendency—especially in those days—to neuter and sentimentalize tough material, but that film got to some harsh truths about the cyclical nature of abuse and found a rich, emotional center in the main character's discovery of family, both old and new (It's great, in other words, with some qualms).

Now, we have director Blitz Bazawule's new variation on the material, and words like "neutered" and "sentimental" feel laughably inadequate to describe what this movie attempts and does. Here's the story of a girl who is physically and sexually abused by her father, passed on like chattel to be further abused by another man, is separated by death and circumstance from the only family members who show her any affection, and finds herself in an empty and aimless life for decades.

That she somehow comes out the other side of it with family and a sense of herself is the ultimate point of the story, of course. However, we have to see and experience all of that misery to understand how it happens and why the character's journey matters.

The musical assumes we know or, at least, suspect all of this already. Since nobody in a Broadway audience or a movie theater probably wants or expects to watch a musical that's about abuse on personal and systematic levels, the filmmakers here jump to the spirt of the ending well before it arrives. It's jarring to witness young Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) give birth to her second child, the result of constant rape committed by her father (played by Deon Cole), and then be treated to a toe-tapping song a couple scenes later.

Something here is very, very wrong. It's impossible to believe that no one involved in either the original stage show or the movie adaptation of it realized that, maybe, an upbeat gospel song might not be the best prelude to incest, an optimistic pop-infused tune might not set the mood after our protagonist is forced to give up another baby, or an empowering anthem about saying "hell, no" to domestic violence might not fully address the awful complexities of the characters' situations or the issue in general. This is a strange, disingenuous movie on a foundational level.

With that out of the way, what are we left with? Well, there are two of thinking on it. First, one could just dismissed the whole thing outright as a mistake, but that would an error as simplistic as the storytelling within this movie, which exists in the way so many musicals do: to draw a line from one song to the next. Second, we could just accept that the material is inherently flawed, while looking to how the filmmakers and actors further fail, try their best with, or rise above the core idea. That feels right.

On the performance level, the movie finds its most obvious successes. There's Fantasia Barrino, taking over the role of Celie for the majority of the story, who lets her physicality and vocalization embody the character's evolution in a way the screenplay (written by Marcus Gardley) simply doesn't have time to develop—what with all the songs getting in the way. Colman Domingo plays the abusive husband, known only to Celie as "Mister," with a level of threat that hides how pathetic he is to the core, and Danielle Brooks commands a scene or three as the self-determined Sofia, who marries Mister's eldest child Harpo (Corey Hawkins) and won't accept the example his father provided to him.

Even if—a big "even" and a bigger "if"—the songs don't suit the material, they're fine as separate entities, which is exactly what they feel like here. Bazawule translates the chorus numbers with wide, static, and clean shots that show off the choreography and talent of the background performers, and yes, Barrino, Brooks, Halle Bailey (as Celie's younger sister), and Taraji P. Henson (as singer Shug Avery, with whom both Mister and Celie are almost youthfully smitten) receive and excel in a solo number or two.

Looking at this as a showcase for the music (from composers/lyricists Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray) and the actors is probably for the best, with Bazawule's aesthetic serving those musical elements well enough. The Color Purple is bright (with lights coming through windows in a stagey way) and cheery, and for these songs, that's the correct approach. It's just the wrong one for pretty much everything else in the story beyond the songs.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)