Do all stories need a retelling? In this case, it’s easier to say maybe not.
Nearly 40 years ago, Steven Spielberg directed the first feature film adaption of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book by the same name to a heart-wrenching, delicate adaptation, with Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Margaret Avery playing the three women leads to great effect, ably supported by an impressive Danny Glover.
Many of the original players of the 1985 film return for this version, including Spielberg as producer along with Quincy Jones and Winfrey, while Goldberg features in a small cameo. However, the thrust of this story about a Black woman in the early 1900s, abused physically and sexually, beaten to the ground and finding a way up with the help of others, is its music.
It’s debatable whether a musical is a best format for a story that packs so much physical pain and endurance in it, especially if the songs are often not very judiciously placed and if they break out just when the sting of the latest blow is just landing.
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However, it would perhaps not be full justice to this Color Purple, directed by the talented Blitz Bazawule, if we hold it just in contrast to its 1985 counterpart.
This is a virtuoso effort on its own strength, with especially Fantasia Barrino growing into the role of Celie, last essayed by award-winning Goldberg, and Danielle Brooks earning an Oscar nomination for the role of the spunky Sofia, who refuses to be broken by men but is almost bruised by race.
Taraji P Henson has the most showy role as Shug Avery, the woman who showed Celie and the others that there was another way of being even in a world where so little was in their hands. While Henson is a force of nature herself, particularly in her performance of Push da Button, Margaret Avery’s performance as Shug had that layer of pathos-lined empathy which Henson’s lacks.
While the 1985 Color Purple was more specific to Celie, and ended up speaking to womanhood at a personal as well as a general level, this version is more about one community — and thus more constrained to that extent.
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There is more talk of God here, and more of the Devil. More about hope and less of those who give up. Why would you not appreciate, for example, that God gave us the colour purple?
If a story makes you pause at that and wonder, would you question another iteration of it, even if you liked the other one more? As Sofia stomps and swears gloriously, “Hell no!”
The Color Purple movie cast: Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, Colman Domingo, Corey Hawkins, H.E.R., Halle Bailey, Phylicia Pearl Mpasi, Fantasia Barrino
The Color Purple movie director: Blitz Bazawule
The Color Purple movie rating: 3 stars
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