There are certain stories that seem to be fundamentally ill-suited for reinvention as a musical, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, with its themes of incestuous rape, spousal abuse, racism, inequality and poverty, is arguably one such story. And yet here we are. After the multi-Oscar-nominated 1985 adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg and a Broadway musical version, Walker’s epic novel returns to the big screen, in this incarnation a tonally jarring song and dance spectacle, directed by Blitz Bazawule (co-director of Beyoncé’s Black Is King).
This decades-spanning story of an embattled Black woman’s struggle to find her inner strength has lost none of its ability to shock. When we first meet Celie (played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as a child and the impressive Fantasia Barrino as an adult), she is a 14-year-old, heavily pregnant for the second time by her monstrous bully of a father (Deon Cole), a father who later barters her into marriage to the violently abusive and serially unfaithful Mister (Colman Domingo). Mister breaks his wife’s spirit and denies her contact with her beloved sister Nettie (played by Halle Bailey as a child). Meanwhile, spirited Sofia (Danielle Brooks), the sometime wife of Mister’s son, is imprisoned for six years for punching a white man.
It’s a punishingly bleak story, and the songs, with their antiseptic polished sheen, seem fundamentally out of tune with the unforgiving grit of the plot. Likewise, the look of the film: there’s a gauzy, honey-dipped nostalgic glow to the photography that romanticises Celie’s grim existence, softening the hard edges and prettifying the misery. While I love a life-affirming tale of redemption as much as the next person, there’s something synthetic and disingenuous about this one.
