The Color Purple review – rides on its stellar performances

The cinema to broadway musical and then back to cinema pipeline is big news in Hollywood, CA, right now, with a glossy, toe-tapping new version of The Color Purple coming to our screens mere weeks after a movie musical update of highschool hit, Mean Girls, made its bow. It’s an understandable commercial gambit: instead of repackaging a beloved story or a robust franchise property, why not at least bring a fresh twist to the table?

Yet in this instance, there’s something vital that’s been lost in translation, where the primal political power of Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has been subverted, diluted and, sadly, softened around the edges. There’s a lot to like in the film, and one would have to be exceptionally untalented to ruin the story outright, but the constantly and sharply oscillating tone doesn’t make this an easy one to love.

The story consists of a wrenching, continent-straddling drama set at the turn of the 20th century in postbellum Georgia and focuses largely on the treatment of women as chattel among a Black community pulling themselves back up from the atrocities of the recent past. Celie (Fantasia Barrino) and Nettie (Halle Bailey) are sisters being brought up by their abusive, rapist father Alfonso (Deon Cole), who quickly palms Celie off on a lecherous wanderer nicknamed Mister (Colman Domingo).

From the shrinking confines of an oppressive existence dedicated to domestic and sexual servitude, Celie tries to look beyond Mister as her captor and attempts to glean solace and liberation from the strong women passing through, such as Mister’s fiery daughter-in-law Sofia (Danielle Brooks) and the alluring jazz chanteuse, Shug Avery (Taraji P Henson).

Yet the bonds they’re able to forge despite everything are tested when the story reminds us of the era’s injustices – virulent racism, endemic inequality, widespread poverty – a context that, while not being the film’s main focal point, offers a powerful reminder of the extent of the characters’ struggles. In many ways, this is a story of how America’s prison industrial complex has historically victimised Black people, while also framing the family as its own form of penitentiary, especially if you’re a woman.

The calculus of adding dreamlike musical numbers to a story that focuses so intensely on the everyday traumas of young women growing up in this place and time makes sense: they offer some levity as well as visualising Celie’s internal life and scuppered aspirations. Yet, the question still stands: does this story really need these interludes which so often serve to undercut the daily horrors that our heroine endures, particularly after her beloved sister goes AWOL.

Director Blitz Bazawule does well to draw out multifaceted performances from his cast, particularly Barrino and Brooks, and with them the big emotional beats all manage to land well enough. Yet the musical flights of fancy feel creatively bound by the stage adaptation and lack a certain eccentric pizazz. One sequence in which Shug and Celie head to the cinema and find themselves within the movie they’re watching is a show-stopper that sadly lacks an equal. Strangely, it feels as if the definitive version of Walker’s extraordinary book has still yet to be made.

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