Before he finally committed to the genre with West Side Story, Steven Spielberg flirted with making a musical a number of times, including his film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. That film wound up with strong musical elements, including a score from producer Quincy Jones, but was primarily a straight drama with compromises more notable – the softening of a lesbian relationship; the telling of a Black woman’s story by a white male director – than its lack of production numbers. Still, the movie did often feel as if it was crying out for bigger, more expressive emotions, to overwhelm or replace the broader moments that Spielberg sometimes fumbled. So when Jones produced a Broadway musical adaptation in 2005, it felt like a natural progression – and so, too, does the Broadway play’s re-adaptation back into film, this time directed by Blitz Bazawule, a Ghanaian filmmaker who previously worked on Black Is King with Beyoncé.
Returning to her Broadway role, Fantasia Barrino plays Celie, the film’s heroine, who struggles through decades of Southern American life in the first half of the 20th century. The movie begins with Celie as a teenage girl (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) who has been repeatedly raped by her monstrous father figure Alfonso (Deon Cole), following the death of her mother. After this abuse results in two pregnancies and subsequent babies Celie is cruelly forced to give up, Alfonso essentially sells her off to Mister (Colman Domingo), a successful farmer who also abuses her, only reinforcing Celie’s quiet feelings of low self-worth. Celie’s sister Nettie (Halle Bailey, then later the singer Ciara) is spunkier and less meek, a lifeline for Celie, but the two are separated early in life, by circumstances that start off tragic only to wind up sort of extraordinary. In Nettie’s absence, Celie’s journey is influenced by other women who pass through her life, including her boisterous friend Sofia (Danielle Brooks) and the brassy singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson). Gradually, Celie comes to realize her own resilience and power, even if it doesn’t always look exactly like Nettie’s, Sofia’s or Shug’s.
Bazawule doesn’t shy away from the sexual relationship between Celie and Shug (who also captivates Mister, arriving in Celie’s life as the houseguest mistress with a previous on-and-off relationship to her husband). Spielberg did, in hope of keeping things PG-13 back in 1985 (and, most likely, also out of his career-long discomfort with sex). This Color Purple is allowed to be a bit bawdier, more explicit (and still, as it happens, within the confines of a PG-13 in 2023). The humor, too, springing from the story’s darker corners, tends toward triumphant release, rather than the clumsily executed slapstick Spielberg sometimes nervously fiddled around with. Sofia in particular – though memorably played by Oprah Winfrey in the earlier film – emerges from Brooks’ performance as a cathartically crowdpleasing figure, aided by the ability to actually burst into a song like “Hell No,” which in turn makes her story’s tragic turn sting all the more.
And yet despite the would-be showstoppers on call, there’s still something strained and even a little sweaty about The Color Purple. Bazawule directs musical numbers unnervingly like the crop of filmmakers who took on stage-to-film adaptations around the time The Color Purple itself was wowing Broadway audiences, meaning his camera maintains an antsy fixation on capturing spectacle rather than making memorable images. There are some that emerge anyway, to be sure: During one song, a besotted Celie imagines a bathtub-bound Shug in the center of a giant spinning record atop a gramophone, while Celie herself circles her. Later, another number is performed on a fantasy art-deco film set, starting in black-and-white before shifting to color. Even in these moments of visual invention, though, Bazawule is pulling a Rob Marshall, using fantasy as a kind of hybrid gimmick and excuse, a compromise between razzle-dazzle and respectability.
Not every song is even that lucky; earlier in the movie, musical snippets often seem to function more like bridge material than fully committed production numbers, only slightly more foregrounded than they were in the earlier film. The camera will start to swoop over the scene, only to cut to another coverage-happy angle, or have the song curtail itself. The numbers build too fast or, sometimes, barely at all. The Color Purple often feels like a rushed 3-D conversion, trying desperately to make its setpieces pop off the screen before hurrying to the next spectacle. Most of the time, these efforts fail, and the sequences remain stagebound despite the mobile camera. There’s a lovely late-movie sequence where Celie walks through scenes set by letters from Nettie that also makes you think: Why is this so much more affecting, and better-directed, than almost all of the actual musical numbers?
This leaves the performers carrying the material home – and maybe that’s Bazawule’s intention, to make something that centers the powerhouse women linked at the center of the story, not some show-offy camera moves. To some degree, it’s an effective strategy. Barrino does an empathetic slow burn toward her eleven o’clock number “I’m Here,” Henson swans about unapologetically, and Brooks gets her applause lines. Yet as an ensemble, the players don’t have a lot of chemistry, at least not compared to the instant bond between Mpasi and Bailey playing siblings in the early scenes. The Color Purple is involving on a scene-to-scene basis, but it has a processional quality. Though it’s less constrained than Spielberg’s sometimes sentimentalized version of the material, the new movie isn’t less sentimental – or less thirsty for audience approval.
Very Broadway, in other words. Broad gestures, telegraphed emotions, and a production too big and lavish to offer much sense of surprise or discovery – minus the aliveness, the electricity, you’d get from an actual stage version. The earlier film felt stuck in its 1985 circumstances, with an all-time-great director attempting to compensate for the shame of how few Black filmmakers would even be considered for the job – and sometimes attempting to communicate too readily in the language of Oscars. The new one progresses in a lumbering sort of way, and winds up mired somewhere in 2005.
Director: Blitz Bazawule
Writer: Marcus Gardley
Starring: Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson, Colman Domingo, Danielle Brooks, Halle Bailey, Phylicia Pearl Mpasi, Corey Hawkins
Release Date: December 25, 2023
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.