This latest rendition of Alice Walker’s epistolary novel, The Color Purple, is once again a movie-musical that kicks the tragedy of the narrative into a dim-lit corner to bring the hollywoodish fantastical elements into play. The choice of such a fanciful genre to narrate a story of rape, domestic violence, and oppression black women face within the community, is both challenging and strange.
The film’s director Blitz Bazawule, screenwriter Marcus Gardley, and producers Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones, deserve genuine appreciation for accepting the difficulty of it. They have explored a narrative ringing with trauma in an apparently unfitting genre which has already been experimented with to tell the same story. Cheers to them, and the astoundingly befitting cast, they have also succeeded in making it leave an independent impression on the audience.
The only question that now arises is what is achieved by again adapting a tragic narrative into a movie-musical (with inspirations also, and even largely, from the 2005 Broadway musical based on the novel)? What is it that makes this adaptation stand out?
Similar to Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation, this film highlights the celebration of sisterhood and builds on Walker’s idea of womanism, making it an absolutely exciting watch. The story is set in Georgia, in the beginning of the twentieth century. A young Celie (played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi with an aptly repressed demeanour of exploited ignorance) is raped by the man she calls father; and before she could even feed her babies, he takes them away from her, leaving her traumatised for years. This man, Alfonso (Deon Cole), also gives her away as wife to a man called Albert (Colman Domingo) who had but wanted to marry her sister Nettie (Halle Bailey), not her. She follows him like a slave to his house, and grows old and depressed tolerating his violence. The older Celie (played by Fantasia Barrino) thus becomes the epitome of silent suffering and repression.
The forbearance in Celie’s character stands out to us even more when we meet Sofia, wife of Albert’s son Harpo (Corey Hawkins), brilliantly portrayed by Danielle Brooks (the performance even outranks Oprah Winfrey’s in the 1985 film). She is well aware of the exploitative nature of the men around her and is determined to fight them; but even Sofia breaks down in the story when met with racism and political power a black woman is in no means to fight and defeat.
However, it is when Albert’s lover, and the whole town’s figure of admiration and desire, Shug Avery (played by Taraji P. Henson), comes into her life, that she learns the beauty of romantic love and freedom, and gradually gains the strength to stand up to Albert. The film celebrates Shug, and her erotic relationship with Celie, to a great extent, that while it emphasises the beauty of female relationships, often evoked in Walker’s writings, it also makes us overlook the villainy of the men in the story.
Walker’s novel, in its epistolary style, tells an extremely tragic story of black women and their journey to freedom. Finding themselves in a society that calls them ugly and dumb becomes an extension of the tragedy. Bazawule’s artistic freedom dominates the film, and makes this difficult journey far too exhilarating. Hence, while the film will be an inspiring watch to the narrative’s first time audience, to the readers of Walker, it will be rather too polished. If you ask me, I savoured the bright colors that came and went, the dimly lit secluded sets that signaled the existence of a fantastical realm, and the songs that took me out of the narrative and hooked me to the characters’ inner dramas. Bazawule exercises his dramatic freedom again, like in his The Burial of Kojo, and it leaves me entertained.
