The Newer, Brighter ‘Color Purple’

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The producers of the new The Color Purple insist that it’s not a remake of Steven Spielberg’s film, nor even the Broadway musical transposed to the screen, but a hybrid of both sources. The 1985 film, the 2005 Broadway show and the 2023 film are all derived from Alice Walker, whose 1982 novel The Color Purple earned a Pulitzer Prize. She was the first Black woman given the prize that honors depictions of American life. This was groundbreaking in the ‘80s when depictions of American life by African American women were seldom widely circulated.

Directed by Blitz Bazawule (Beyoncé’s Black is King) with a screenplay by playwright Marcus Gardley, the new Color Purple is closer to the book than its predecessors; it’s entertainment that doesn’t avert the viewers eyes from the horrors depicted in Walker’s novel yet cannot present her story with the naked frankness of the printed page. (Ticket sales to an NC-17 musical?) It should also be said that even before the current wave of book banning, The Color Purple was the object of school library censorship.

Set on the Georgia seacoast during the first decades of the last century, the film begins with sisters Celie and Nettie (played in adulthood by Fantasia Barrino and Halle Bailey) dressed in white, seated faced to each other on the mossy branch of an ancient tree. They are off to church—and the film’s first song and dance number, a spiritual amped up for contemporary Broadway with the preacher sermonizing in rhythm as the congregation surrenders to the Spirit. But the beauty of the sun-drenched landscape and the Sunday ecstasy is in stark contrast to the ugliness of human society on the other six days of the week.

Gradually it becomes clear that the child carried by Celie was sired by her father, a grim-faced man who takes away her baby and “gives it to God,” he says. His meaning is unclear, but infanticide is likely. Celie is serenaded by Mister (Colman Domingo), playing banjo on horseback and spinning pretty words about her beauty. She is traded to him by her father in a business transaction and is slapped to the floor the moment she questions her new “husband.” Men expect servitude from the women folk. Sex is herky-jerky and unpleasant, especially for women.

Nettie finds refuge in Mister’s house after her father begins to touch her—until she’s forced to fight off Mister’s rape attempt. Cast into the dark night with a shotgun’s warning against returning, Nettie writes Celie every week for years, but Mister never passes on the letters.

Invisible beyond the story’s segregated Black town is the racist system enclosing its inhabitants in a pressure cooker. 

One woman stands up and fights. The assertive Sofia (Danielle Brooks) is a force of nature, browbeating Mister’s mild-mannered son Harpo (Corey Hawkins) and delivering the screenplay’s funniest lines, putdowns to the preening roosters who rule the town. And then there is the preacher’s daughter Shug (Taraji P. Henson), a blues recording artist a la Bessie Smith, extravagant in her gowns and headdresses, driven into town by a Black chauffeur in a fancy car.

Shug exerts power over men through her sensuality. Her erotic interests include intimacy with Celie, a theme omitted from the 1985 film. Rejecting the dogmatism of her father, she finds God in the blues, in the sunshine, in the flowers of the fields around her. God will be angry, she tells Celie, “If you walk past the color purple and not notice it.” His command is to be alive in all of life’s rich diversity.

The musical numbers follow the Broadway show with a few additional songs. Most are incorporated effectively into the storyline, as when young Celia walks through a work gang of prisoners in stripes, breaking rocks in the hot sun, or when Harpo and his friends build a house, their sawing and hammering choreographed to song. The showstopper is a bird’s eye view of Shug in a tub filled with bubble bath, revolving at the center of a giant 78 RPM record. Fortunately for her, the disc is moving at a speed closer to 33 and 1/3.