VERDICT: Alice Walker’s saga of sisterhood and survival becomes a rousing and heartfelt screen musical.
The path from novel to movie to stage musical to film musical can be a perilous one; just try sitting through Lucille Ball in Mame. But like its indefatigable protagonist Celie, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple proves resilient and powerful enough to endure each subsequent translation.
It’s no easy thing to translate a stage musical to the screen, or to adapt a book that has been cherished and beloved by millions, or to remake a Steven Spielberg movie — no one has ever previously attempted the latter — but director Blitz Bazawule (The Burial of Kojo) has created a sweeping work that stands on its own merits. He doesn’t reinvent Walker’s story, but he tells it with such sensitivity and power that audiences will relish experiencing that story again.
It’s the tale of Celie (played first by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi, then as an adult by Fantasia Barrino), who endures horrific abuse at the hand of her father (who impregnates her twice) and then from her husband Mister (Colman Domingo). She’s guided through the turmoil of life by the women who stand by her along the way, starting with her sister Nettie (Halle Bailey/Ciara), and then later Sofia (Danielle Brooks), the outspoken wife of Mister’s son Harpo (Corey Hawkins), and Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), the larger-than-life blues singer who’s the love of Mister’s life (though he isn’t exactly hers).
The enduring popularity of The Color Purple across various media has rendered its story beats as intrinsically familiar to audiences as the plot points of A Christmas Carol, and like the oft-musicalized Dickens novella, it’s up to the adapters to figure out how to incorporate song and dance into the tale.
Bazawule and his creative team (beginning with screenwriter Marcus Gardley, The Chi) have the benefit of a story that has always encompassed a musical element — thanks to Shug’s juke-joint appearances and her preacher father’s church choir — but this mix of material from its earlier sources and the stage musical version never glosses over or renders artificial the power of Walker’s storytelling.
Choreographer Fatima Robinson (whose work is also currently on display in Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé) devises dances for everyone from Southern townspeople to African villagers to a chain gang of prisoners that feel organic to time and place and never like a troupe of Broadway chorus performers who happen to be wearing costumes.
Robinson’s choices mesh perfectly with the songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, which incorporate blues and gospel in a way that feels germane to the film’s early–20th-century setting. And for viewers whose ideas of the screen musical skew toward the traditional, there’s a stunning fantasy sequence where Celie and Shug perform a duet with a big band on a mirrored ballroom floor.
Celie and Shug’s love story, incidentally, gets a specificity and a focus that Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation largely avoided, and it bolsters the storytelling and the character-building. This Color Purple is an ensemble piece where the whole cast gets the opportunity to shine, but Barrino, as she did onstage, delivers an emotional intensity that makes her stand out in such distinguished company.
Unlike some Broadway performers who unleash their playing-to-the-rear-mezzanine energy on a camera that’s just inches away, Barrino modulates her extraordinary stage presence but still delivers — particularly during Celie’s standout final number, “I’m Here” — the kind of raw star quality and tears-inducing empathy that makes audiences sit up straight. (Mpasi and Barrino, incidentally, offer one of the most seamless onscreen transitions from one stage of a character’s life to another in recent memory.)
The entire ensemble has big shoes to fill coming off the Spielberg version, but each performer carves out their own space, whether it’s Domingo finding avenues of menace beyond even Danny Glover’s portrayal of villainy or Brooks all but stealing the show as the passionate and persistent Sofia. Like Ariana DeBose having to play Anita in West Side Story opposite Rita Moreno, who preceded her in the role, Brooks had to tackle Sofia in the presence of Oprah Winfrey, one of this film’s producers.
The craft team has created a visually rich world for these characters — including a sprawling seaside tree that calls to mind Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust — and director of photography Dan Laustsen (Nightmare Alley) finds just the right light for every location, from the coastal, rural South to African villages beset by British colonialism to Shug’s swanky Memphis mansion.
Fans of the unfettered emotionalism of the Steven Spielberg version might find this musical relatively restrained in its sentimentality, but ultimately, that’s one of the factors that makes this take on The Color Purple both its separate entity and an adaptation that reflects its era. In any event, this new film resonates powerfully both as an emotional drama and as a welcome addition to the movie-musical canon.
