If The Producers’ Max Bialystock had been looking for a different kind of keep-the-punters-away tax avoidance scheme and decided that ‘Springtime for Hitler’ wasn’t quite on-the-nose enough, he might have staged a musical about abuse, rape and incest set in the American Deep South. Surely big show tunes sharing the stage with domestic abusers would be the kind of jarring that ensures empty seats every night and keeps the IRS at bay?
Except, the massive success of The Color Purple on the Broadway stage gives emphatic, Tony-nominated lie to that notion. The pared-back 2015 revival, in particular, made an ironclad case that big songs and deep sorrows aren’t necessarily oil and water.
This polished new movie version of The Color Purple, adapted from the same stage musical (itself adapted from Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning novel), doesn’t make that case nearly as convincingly. It’s far from a ham-fisted, tasteless Bialystocky nightmare. But neither does it avoid some jarring dissonance, as Celie, a young Black woman in 1900s Georgia, goes from a deep personal hell to some hard-won peace via slickly choreographed saloon-bar stompers, banjo-picking blues numbers, and an awkwardly-staged soul ballad framed within an RKO-style dream sequence.
Celie is played by American Idol breakout Fantasia Barrino, who took the role on its 2010 US tour and has the vocal and emotional range to stir the heart, even as showier characters turn up to overshadow her. The film opens with the tone-setting information that her father has raped her and sired two children with her, both of which are given up for adoption. She’s then married to abusive farmer ‘Mister’ (Colman Domingo) and seemingly damned to a life of utter misery.
Enter extrovert jazz singer Shug Avery (Taraji P Henson) and the defiant Sofia (Danielle Brooks, in scene-stealing, Oscar-nominated form) to teach her to fight back. There’s a lesbian subplot between Shug and Celie that’s polite rather than passionate.
Danielle Brooks is in scene-stealing, Oscar-nominated form
Helping shake off the legacy of Steven Spielberg’s 11-times-Oscar-nominated 1985 version, with which is shares little more than the basic plot points, Ghanaian director Blitz Bazawule freshens things nicely up a smartly staged interlude in colonial Africa and some vibrant scenes on the Atlantic coast that tip a bonnet to Julie Dash’s great Daughters of the Dust.
Like those locations, the musical numbers are impressive enough, the story is full of uplift and defiance, and it’s all lit gorgeously by The Shape of Water cinematographer Dan Laustsen. But there’s a tension between the rawness of Celie’s experiences and the razzmatazz around her that Bazawule never resolves. There are some wounds here that don’t want to be made a spectacle of.
In UK cinemas Jan 26. Streaming in the US now
