Yahoo News ‘The Color Purple’ Review: Fantasia Barrino Is the Molten Heart of Spirited Musical Remake
For a story so filled with trauma and sorrow — violence, suffering, racism, child abduction, spousal abuse — the second screen adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, The Color Purple, is a surprisingly joyful experience. The prevailing takeaway is its resounding themes of spirituality, self-discovery, redemption and resilience. Based on the 2005 Broadway musical that was revived to great acclaim 10 years later, the production marks a confident move onto a much larger canvas for Ghanaian multimedia artist Blitz Bazawule. It nods graciously to the imprint of Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film while vigorously forging its own identity.
The connection to the earlier version is partly built in by having Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones back on board as producers (alongside stage producer Scott Sanders). It’s also evident in the color palette of those shimmering Amblin skies, in two songs from the movie incorporated into the Broadway score and in an unbilled cameo early on.
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The stage musical features songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray and a book by Marsha Norman, which credits both the Walker novel and Menno Meyjes’ screenplay for the Spielberg film as source material. Playwright Marcus Gardley penned the latest adaptation, which stays true to the story’s previous iterations and their indelible portrait of the lives of Black women in the rural South of the early 20th century. Where this new film arguably gains in complexity is in its greater insight into the key male characters and the vividness with which it shapes the milieu around the importance of folk culture, music and faith.
Fantasia Barrino stepped into the lead role of Celie in the second year of the show’s original Broadway run. She proved herself not only a powerhouse vocalist but also an instinctual actor, tapping with tenderness and vulnerability into what seemed like a strong personal connection to the story.
Her performance was raw and real, putting Celie more firmly at the emotional center of a musical in which the protagonist spends a lot of time as a passive figure on the sidelines. That’s one of the inherent risks of having such scene-stealing supporting characters as the indomitable Sofia and the flamboyant juke-joint singer Shug Avery.
In an impressive dramatic film debut, Barrino makes an affecting journey of Celie’s emergence from hardship and oppression to independence, proud self-worth and love overflowing. Even if Bazawule’s film again takes its time centering Celie in her own narrative, few will be complaining when she’s sharing the attention with the wonderful Danielle Brooks, a titanic force reprising the role of Sofia that she played on Broadway in the 2015 revival; and with an equally divine Taraji P. Henson, showing megawatt charisma, exultant musicality and brassy glamor as Shug.
Smart casting is the movie’s greatest strength; the entire ensemble shines.
As banjo-plucking Mister, the louse of a husband who acquires Celie for the price of a cow and a couple of eggs and then treats her like a workhorse to be beaten at will, Colman Domingo is suitably contemptible. But he’s also a damaged man who inherited all the worst traits of his small-minded, domineering father (Louis Gossett Jr.). He’s unable to be with Shug, the woman he truly loves, who comes and goes from his life as she pleases and is destined to remain elusive. Domingo locates an inarticulate longing beneath Mister’s brokenness that makes his eventual atonement both credible and moving.
Mister’s son Harpo also becomes more nuanced in Corey Hawkins’ characterization — not to mention building on the actor’s In the Heights work with further evidence of his song-and-dance skills. Driven by his heart and not by the social conditioning of his upbringing, Harpo seems determined to break the cycle of men ruled by their hardness. He stumbles badly, and regrets it instantly, by succumbing to outmoded notions of how to keep his feisty wife Sofia in line. But until that misjudgment — prompting Brooks’ thundering refusal to be subjugated in one of the standout songs, “Hell No!” — their marriage is the blissful opposite of his father’s loveless union with Celie.
Bazawule and Nick Baxter have written a new song for Harpo, “Workin’,” performed while constructing the juke joint by the swamp that sets him on his entrepreneurial path. The marked difference between Mister and his eldest son is humorously encapsulated when Harpo and the men on his building crew are brushed aside as Sofia and the women take over.
That almost throwaway song, like many of the musical interludes, is pumped up by Fatima Robinson’s energetic choreography into a robust production number. If there’s a nagging fault with Bazawule’s approach to the material, it’s the feeling early on that not every song needs to be quite so big.
There’s undeniable spectacle in the whirling churchgoers heading into Sunday service, a percussive chain gang swinging pickaxes, a group of women doing laundry against the curtain of a waterfall — the latter images summoned out of Celie’s imagination — or the general jubilation of “Shug Avery Comin’ to Town.” But the film might have benefited from the earlier placement of an intimate ballad or two, particularly in terms of emotional access to a protagonist who, by narrative design, takes a long time to find her voice.
The stylistic flourish of Celie imagining herself and Shug on a gramophone turntable also feels out of step with the rest of the movie. It’s as if Bazawule can’t decide between dramatically integrating the songs or veering off into Chicago-type fantasy detours, an unnecessary distraction that also occurs midway through Henson’s showstopper, “Push Da Button.”
The director’s touch is more consistent in the dramatic scenes, where the storytelling and performances are strong enough to overcome the missteps.
Phylicia Pearl Mpasi is touching as the young Celie, her heart ripped open when her adored younger sister Nettie (Halle Bailey) is torn from her life. It’s a testament also to Bailey’s lovely presence — Nettie is breezy, outgoing and sure of herself in ways her downtrodden sister can admire but not yet emulate — that the yearning represented by Nettie’s absence in Celie’s life is palpably felt throughout.
That absence is ameliorated to some degree by the explosive entry of Sofia, whose take-no-shit attitude Brooks socks across with natural gusto and command. Her infectious humor and effervescence make it all the more crushing to see the character brutalized for her outspokenness to the condescending mayor’s wife (Elizabeth Marvel). Still, even if Sofia is brought low for a large part of the story, Brooks’ radiant performance is one of the chief sources of the movie’s levity, constantly breaking through like sunbeams through cloud. (Sadly, Sofia and Harpo’s frisky duet, “Any Little Thing,” has been dropped from this version.)
The other person who opens Celie’s mesmerized eyes to a different model of self-possessed womanhood is Shug, who captures her imagination even before they meet, from a framed photograph Mister keeps by his bed.
Henson makes Shug a beacon of warmth and sensual vitality, even when she shows up at Mister’s house needing to dry out after a bender. She never mocks Celie, nor treats her as an inferior, instead taking the subservient wife of her on-and-off lover under her wing with uplifting sisterhood, bringing her a happiness she hasn’t known since Nettie’s departure. While the lesbian element of the relationship from Walker’s novel has been further diluted with each retelling, it’s not altogether erased, and Barrino and Henson’s rhapsodic duet on “What About Love?” is an emotional turning point as hope begins to illuminate Celie’s life.
The signposts of her emancipation are writ large, first in a stirring restaging of the classic extended family meal scene in which she finally stands up to Mister. By that time, every person in the audience will share Celie’s indignation, her newly acquired authority and her God-given right to exact retribution, played with formidable fire by Barrino and echoed with salty humor by Brooks as Sofia more or less returns from death.
Shug also celebrates Celie’s deliverance once she’s out from under Mister’s boot in Memphis, paying loving tribute by singing “Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister),” one of Jones’ tunes carried over from the Spielberg movie. The other is “Maybe God is Tryin’ to Tell You Somethin’,” a hymn that marks the end of Shug’s exile as an outcast “loose woman” and her renewed acceptance by her preacher father (David Alan Grier). Costumer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck’s outfits for Shug are stunners, particularly the knockout red ensemble she wears for her debut as the star attraction at Harpo’s, making a grand entrance by boat.
Anyone with an appreciation for style will get a kick out of high-waisted 1940s trousers used as a symbol for triumphant self-actualization, and Jamison-Tanchuck’s sterling work is especially vibrant once Celie’s tailoring business takes off. “Miss Celie’s Pants” is one exuberant production number where the big energy feels entirely earned.
From there, Barrino navigates the transition to independence and proud self-worth with ecstatic feeling in the musical’s “11 o’clock number,” “I’m Here.” She performs the song’s big build direct to camera, allowing Celie to take decisive ownership of her story and transition to a final act that becomes a full-throated declaration of gratitude and praise.
While Bazawule and fellow executive music producers Baxter and Bray honor the musical’s stylistic mix of gospel, pop, R&B, blues, jazz and Broadway show tunes, there’s also a welcome contemporary flavor to some of the numbers here, notably “Keep It Movin’,” led by Bailey’s young Nettie in gorgeous voice.
In addition to Grier, Gossett and Marvel, the deluxe casting even of minor roles includes Ciara stepping in for a brief appearance as the adult Nettie; Gabriella Wilson, aka H.E.R., as Harpo’s girlfriend Squeak; Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (so intensely moving in Ava DuVernay’s Origin) as Celie’s mother in flashbacks; and Jon Batiste, looking fabulous in sharp suits as Shug’s stylish husband, Grady.
Bazawule’s background as a multihyphenate artist — he previously co-directed the Beyoncé visual album Black Is King, made his feature debut in 2019 with the well-reviewed Afro-futuristic fable The Burial of Kojo and doubles as hip-hop recording artist Blitz the Ambassador — ensures that the movie not only sounds great but looks sumptuous, too. The use of light and color in Dan Laustsen’s cinematography is captivating, and Paul Denham Austerberry’s period production design adds an appealing hint of theatrical magic to authentic settings. Location features such as a Georgia beach with huge sculptural tangles of driftwood or trees draped in Spanish moss are beautiful.
It’s pretty much impossible to resist the explosive reclamation of life in the movie’s enormously satisfying closing scenes, which should fulfill the dual aim of reimagining The Color Purple for a new audience while putting a sparkling fresh gloss on the story for the generation that grew up on the Spielberg version.
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