If a novel is unfilmable anyway, why not take a wild shot at it? That seems to be the guiding ethos behind The Color Purple, adapted from the Broadway musical that was itself an adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel. (Steven Spielberg directed a more traditional version in 1985.) In place of Walker’s epistolary structure—letters between two sisters who were separated as teens in the early 1900s, after surviving a traumatic childhood in rural Georgia—this Color Purple gives us musical numbers. Many of these feel truncated; even the best of them flatten the layers of sociology, theology, gender, and sexuality that made Walker’s book such a masterwork. But they are powerful and invigorating in the moment, and they maintain what made the novel more than a thesis statement: its sense of testimony. The best numbers in The Color Purple capture the anger and/or exultation of personal experience. I think particularly of Danielle Brooks—the film’s breakout star—as Sofia, turning the tables on gender roles in “Hell No!” (helped in no small part by backup dancers who bring an army of attitude). And I think of Fantasia Barrino as Celie, the victimized and eventually vindicated main character, belting out “I’m Here” at the film’s climax in a way that captures the gradual breakdown of long-suffering stoicism and the slow inrushing of deep joy. Directed by Blitz Bazawule, one of the filmmakers who contributed to the Beyonce “visual album” Black Is King, with choreography by Fatima Robinson.
(12/19/2023)
