In ‘The Color Purple,’ Joy Rules the Day: Review

Tright here’s a small however vital nugget of film historical past wrapped within the vibrant finery of Ghanaian director Blitz Bazawule’s film model of the Broadway musical The Shade Purple. Roughly halfway via, two of the film’s central characters—Fantasia Barrino’s Celie, an abused spouse who’s slowly reclaiming her sense of self, and the girl she’s fallen for, Taraji P. Henson’s sultry Jazz Age juke-joint singer Shug Avery—drive from the nation to a film palace within the metropolis. The characteristic they see there, marketed in lights, is The Flying Ace; splashed throughout its poster are the phrases “with an all-colored solid.” The Flying Ace, launched in 1926 and directed by Richard E. Norman, is an actual film. It was a part of what was recognized on the time as a race movie: if America’s segregation and racism meant that Black residents have been largely shut out of Hollywood, African Individuals would construct their very own world of refined leisure, creating areas for their very own performers to flourish. Some 100 years later, these areas nonetheless should be carved out, and that’s what Bazawule—together with a roster of producers together with Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, and Steven Spielberg—has executed with The Shade Purple. The film is energetic and enjoyable, with out betraying the heavy undertones of a few of its material. It’s a reclamation, however a buoyant quite than somber one.

The story, drawn from Alice Walker’s 1982 novel—which, earlier than it was reimagined as a Tony Award–successful musical, had additionally been made right into a movie by Steven Spielberg—begins in 1909 coastal Georgia, the place two younger sisters must be residing carefree lives. However Celie (at this stage performed by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) and Nettie (Halle Bailey) are caught residing by the foundations of their tyrant father (Deon Cole). Worst of all, he has raped Celie, impregnating her for the second time; he’ll take this new child away, as he did the primary, leaving the bereaved Celie to marvel if her misplaced kids are alive or lifeless. He later marries Celie off to an area smoothie, Colman Domingo’s Mister, an enormous male ego with a banjo hooked up. (He strums it with menacing attraction.) Mister additionally abuses Celie, bodily and emotionally; even worse, he separates the 2 close-knit sisters, a compelled estrangement that can final for years. Celie—performed as an grownup by Fantasia—is good-natured and obedient, and he or she makes one of the best of her state of affairs, however that is removed from the life she deserves.

The remainder of The Shade Purple exhibits us how Celie slowly builds that higher life for herself, her world made greater over time by the individuals she meets. Her stepson Harpo (Corey Hawkins) brings a sassy bride into the fold: Sofia (Danielle Brooks) has huge concepts about how girls must be handled, and he or she walks out on Harpo when, following the awful instance set by his father—and taking recommendation that Celie herself provides him—he tries to manage her by beating her. Sofia will come again into Celie’s life later, although her defiant spirit may even trigger her to endure unjustly by the hands of white individuals. However the one who will change Celie’s life essentially the most—or who, quite, palms her the keys that permit her to vary it herself—is Henson’s Shug, who purrs onto the scene in a splash of pink sequins. There’s strife on this Shade Purple, however struggling by no means guidelines the day.

Reimagining Walker’s novel, and Spielberg’s movie model, as a musical was a stroke of genius, a manner of steering the story out of trauma-porn territory and right into a world of hope and celebration. This materials—with music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, and a guide by Marsha Norman—feels vibrant and alive, and Bazawule (who co-directed Beyoncé’s 2020 visible album Black Is King) navigates it gracefully. Although lots of the musical numbers are elaborate, they not often really feel overstuffed. An early quantity, “Mysterious Methods,” celebrates the enjoyment of gathering to worship on Sunday, the ladies strutting forth in creamy pastel attire topped by fondant hats, the lads high-stepping as their brilliant gold-and-yellow church robes whirl round them. When Mpasi’s Celie learns that no less than one in all her infants is alive, her happiness takes to the air in “She Be Mine”—as she twirls and sings, she additionally takes her place in a workaday world represented by males swinging their hammers in unison on a series gang, and girls getting their laundry executed in opposition to the backdrop of a speeding waterfall. It’s the little issues, and typically the large issues, that preserve us going via all of it. And Brooks’ Sofia, accompanied by a cadre of stomping girls dancers with sturdy baskets tucked below their arms, leads one of the crucial rousing numbers, the mad-as-hell anthem “Hell No!”

The casting of The Shade Purple provides Bazawule virtually too a lot expertise to work with: Jon Batiste exhibits up as a modern hipster husband (and will get one of many film’s greatest laughs with a wonderfully timed one-liner). The hip-swinging Brooks stands out as the film’s clear standout, however because the grown-up Celie, Fantasia is a watchful, affecting presence. Her scenes with Henson, specifically, have a candy praline crackle. They get an enormous fantasy artwork deco dance quantity, rendered in satiny black-and-white that provides technique to muted, marble-toned coloration. Wearing coordinating beaded attire—Shug’s is bridal white, Celie’s is tuxedo black, a classy salt-and-pepper match—they profess their love for one another as they glide throughout a shiny dance ground, backed by a full orchestra wearing celestial white fits.

This can be a dream of what life must be, and this model of The Shade Purple makes room for it even amid some harsh realities. Spielberg’s 1985 movie—starring Whoopi Goldberg as Celie (she has a cameo on this model) and Oprah Winfrey as Sofia—has usually been dismissed as an insufficient adaptation of Walker’s guide. And he himself has stated he was in all probability the unsuitable particular person to make it, although the movie is fascinating in its personal proper: it’s as if Spielberg had hoped to make use of a number of the methods and logos of D.W. Griffith—the heightened emotional melodrama, the swirling snowstorms, the iris pictures—to apologize for Griffith’s racist sins. However Bazawale’s Shade Purple is the one which’s proper for at present. Its themes are simple: it’s concerning the significance of preserving your head held excessive, concerning the methods communities of ladies maintain societies collectively, concerning the chance and the facility of redemption. It’s additionally a lavish spectacle, unapologetic in its pleasure, taking on house for itself with out first asking permission. It is the promise of movies like The Flying Ace, and others prefer it, lastly coming to fruition. It solely took 100 years.