The Color Purple: Movie Review

Cast: Danielle Brooks, Fantasia Barrino, Colman Domingo, Corey Hawkins, Taraji P Henson, Halle Bailey
Director: Blitz Bazawule

There's an unevenness to the 2023 remake of The Color Purple, the latest adaptation of Alice Walker's 1982 novel and the stage version that graced Broadway.

While the cinematic version leans more heavily on the musical side of proceedings and can be relied on to implicitly capture both the aesthetics and the atmospherics of Georgia and black culture, much of what transpires feels almost sluggish and an endurance rather than a cathartic experience.

While it begins with the sisterhood of Celie and Nettie, the film soon flips into the story of Celie and her years of misery at the hands of an abusive husband and pining for the children she was forced to give away when she was younger.

As Celie endures years of abuse and unhappiness while married to Mister, The Color Purple finds fantastical escape from her suffering with some truly soulful numbers and offers her the chance of escape in fleeting friendships and visitations.

But at times, The Color Purple is more interested in shying away from some of the harsher truths, and while understandably over its 140 minute run time any continued and sustained abuse could be both triggering and a slog, there's also a feeling that director Bazawule is sanitising some of the proceedings and hiding from the reality of Walker's novel.

With blues and roots music playing a big part of the film, The Color Purple's occasionally escapist musical scenes burst with vibrancy and urgency. Perhaps some of that is due to Henson's OTT turn as the peacocking singer Shug who whips up an otherworldliness when she arrives in Celie's world, like a flame on a long dark night.

Ultimately, The Color Purple feels restrained and suffers from narrative issues inherent to most musicals (the disappearance of key cast members without a trace, the neatly bow-tied resolutions of all story lines), leaving what could have been a truly powerful affair feeling more desperately muted than it ever should have been.