‘The Color Purple’ does not feel new
Nearly four decades after Steven Spielberg adapted Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple” into a flawed film with some bright spots, a new film version has arrived with virtually the same qualities, only set to music.
Danielle Brooks (“Orange Is the New Black”) and Taraji P. Henson (“Empire”) provide the best moments in this movie musical, directed by Blitz Bazawule (Beyoncé’s “Black Is King”) and drawn from the 2005 Broadway musical adaptation of Walker’s book. Brooks and Henson play the exuberantly self-confident Sofia and Shug, roles that previously earned Oprah Winfrey and Margaret Avery Oscar nominations.
Walker’s writing gave all four actors a head start by setting up Sofia and Shug to shine on any page, stage or screen. These characters’ entries into the basic story offer relief — sometimes comic, mostly spiritual — from the abuses suffered by protagonist Celie (Fantasia Barrino in this latest movie adaptation), who is raped and impregnated by her father before being forced into marriage to another awful man, Albert “Mister” Johnson (Colman Domingo).
Brooks reprises her role as Sofia, Celie’s stepdaughter-inlaw, from Broadway and embodies her headstrong, funloving qualities even more vividly than Winfrey. Sofia shows and tells Celie how to challenge men, standing up to her own husband and deflecting her toxic father-in-law’s insults.
If Sofia brings awareness, then Shug, who is Mister’s mistress and Celie’s eventual sexual liberator, introduces pleasure, a concept previously unknown to Celie. Henson practically purrs with self-assurance and hedonism, all wrapped in an essential kindness that enhances Shug’s already considerable appeal from previous iterations.
Walker did not provide advantage for actors playing Celie, often a shy observer of her own life. Whoopi Goldberg brought a stillness to Celie in Spielberg’s 1985 film that made the viewer come to her. Barrino, reprising the role from Broadway, is a less powerful screen presence — except when she sings, and the emotions flow and her vocal superiority to the other actors becomes evident.
Henson and Brooks are decent singers, but they really sell their musical performances through acting and old-fashioned bravado. Barrino’s delivery is more restrained, but her range and control are clearly greater.
What songs do each sing? Couldn’t tell you offhand, apart from Henson’s erotic reading of “Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister),” also in the first movie. Most newer songs are pleasant but generically Broadway torchy or evocative of mid-tier 1990s-2000s radio-friendly pop and R&B. But a few musical sequences transcend thanks to Fatima Robinson’s exquisite choreography, which enables movements so fluid that groups of people spontaneously breaking into dance seems natural.
Bazawule unfortunately presents the romance between Celie and Shug just as chastely as Spielberg did, although with a welcome addition of Celie yearning for Shug even before meeting her, just based on reputation and her photo on Mister’s nightstand.
Domingo, the San Francisco stage veteran and a likely Oscar nominee for this year’s “Rustin,” heightens Mister’s villainy to a degree that it can seem cartoonish. But Mister is a serious monster. He not only beats Celie but intends to rape her younger sister, Nettie (“Little Mermaid” star Halle Bailey, underutilized here, as is Vallejo native H.E.R., in a small role). After running off Nettie, Mister hides her letters to Celie for years.
The film doubles down on previous attempts to humanize Mister by actively trying to establish him as a nice guy, deep down. It is just one improbable element in an artificially sunny third act that might reflect the story’s trip through the Broadway spin cycle or dream-maker Winfrey’s influence as a lead producer.
Walker’s novel is inherently difficult to translate into visual entertainment because seeing the horrors of Celie’s life is naturally more difficult than reading about them. It is such a brutal tale that an arc toward triumph or even peace for Celie, or toward forgiveness for Mister, requires more exploration of abiding faith in God and life in the Jim Crow South than a film-length adaptation can deliver.
“The Color Purple” now has been a movie, a Broadway show, a revived Broadway show and movie musical when it always should have been a TV miniseries.