The Color Purple: Pallid songs drain Alice Walker’s tale of its power

Saturday, 27 January 2024

The Color Purple (M, 141mins) Directed by Blitz Bazawule **½

When the producer of the trio of blockbuster flicks that made me fall in love with the movies – Gremlins, The Goonies and Back to the Future (not to mention being the director of the earlier heart-wrenching and wonder-inducing E.T the Extra-Terrestrial) – decided to tackle Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel The Color Purple as his next project behind the camera, I was confused and hurt.

Why would the man who had brought such joy to tweens and teens all over the world decide to turn his back on that audience and make, what I believed to be, a very adult drama?

My 12-year-old self decided to boycott it – and took a small measure of satisfaction from it going home from the Academy Awards empty-handed despite being nominated for 11 Oscars.

Four years later, The Colour Purple loomed into my life again, when my English teacher father was embroiled in a debate with then opposition education spokesman Lockwood Smith over the use of the book as part of the sixth-form curriculum.

Smith, then best known as a former TV kids' quiz show host who insisted the contestants call him 'sir' (reader, you’ll be pleased to know my defiant older brother refused to do so when he appeared for our school), was outraged that students were studying something that focused their minds on incest, sexual violence and lesbianism.

Talking to Radio New Zealand at the time, he said 'students should not be studying passages that could not be publicly broadcasted because of the words used in them'.

Senior teachers like my dad spoke out in defence of the book, citing other celebrated and regularly studied authors (Shakespeare, anyone?) whose works dealt with similar issues, while also muttering darkly about 'book burnings' and 'witch hunts'. Eventually, Smith backed down.

I’m not sure what the now knighted 75-year-old former High Commissioner to the UK would make of this latest cinematic version, but he’d probably approve of its sanitisation of the more “challenging” aspects of the plot.

It’s still the tumultuous, near-four decade story of sisters Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and former American Idol-winner Fantasia Barrino) and Nettie (The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey and singer Ciara, who Kiwis might remember from an infamous 2015 tour of Aotearoa Harris. as a shared troubled childhood eventually leads to them being separated by an ocean.

For Celie, losing her sibling just adds to the woe of parting with her two children as soon as they were born. Each time her father Alfonso (Deon Cole) had demanded she “hand them over to God”, but she never understood why the deity didn’t ever give them back.

Then, despite Nettie attracting the attention of widower Albert (Colman Domingo), it was Celie who her father persuaded him to take, for the price of “a cow and some eggs”.

Life in his household wasn’t much better, Albert demanding she call him Mister and regularly getting physical when displeased. And that was before, despite agreeing to Nettie being allowed to stay, he sends her packing.

However, this bright, lavishly-costumed version probably boasts as much finger-clicking, as it does slapping. Yes, as with the Mean Girls update likely playing in adjacent auditoriums around the motu, this is an adaptation of a Broadway musical version of the source material.

In this case, it’s one that clearly wanted to be the next Chicago, a tale filled with strong women and one-dimensional men.

But while there’s plenty of hoofing and hollering and Ghanaian-born director Blitz Bazawule certainly knows how to capture a well-choreographed sequence (he did look after Beyonce’s 2020 The Lion King-inspired visual album Black is King after all), there’s very few stand-out moments or songs across the near two-and-a-half-hour running time.

Most of the tunes feel only half-formed, snatches to drive the plot along, or fantasy vignettes to help the main characters escape their depressing realities.

Watching it unfold actually makes it easy to see why this never managed to become a beloved Broadway staple, only managing five years between two stagings separated by almost a decade.

Perhaps equally damning is that one of the supporting characters, Sofia (Danielle Spencer), is the person whose sub-plot involving the Mayor’s wife elicits one of the strongest emotional responses. As we now know, Spencer is also the only one nominated for an Academy Award too.

One wonders if the London production and Broadway revival’s star, the brilliant Cynthia Erivo might have made a difference as Celie, but, to be fair, Fantasia is no scarlet woman here, it’s the favouring of glitz over grit that really drains this Purple of all its colour and potency.

The Color Purple is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.