The Color Purple
Netflix Synopsis: Directed by Steven Spielberg, this film is a sterling adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Whoopi Goldberg stars as Celie, a Southern woman whose correspondence with her sister in Africa helps her escape an abusive husband (portrayed with a scary edge by Danny Glover). Quincy Jones’s evocative soundtrack and a moving performance by Oprah Winfrey make this Oscar-nominated film an all-time favorite.
Review: I’d heard so much about this film in the past and with Oprah Winfrey and the new Broadway musical The Color Purple, I moved it to the top and tried to catch it over MLK weekend but couldn’t squeeze it in. I finally got to see it this past week and was not disappointed in the slightest. A wonderful film when Whoopi was still an unknown, it opens with her as Celie and her inseparable sister Nettie, playing and frolicking in the fields outside their father’s farm, awash in purple flowers.
My god Whoopi was absolutely wonderful in this – playing a woman who has been abused her whole life, but more importantly and poignantly, a woman who has learned to take that abuse. While at first there is a spark of rebellion in her, she becomes acclimated to the abuse, more out of coercion from the Danny Glover character than anything intrinsic to her personality. In any case, the result is a subdued, almost zombified woman who is essentially a slave to her husband’s authority.The hope that she and her sister will be reunited (which Glover obstructs by hiding Nettie’s letters from Celie) keep her going in her hell on earth.
In addition, her contacts with the outside world
(in the form of Shug and Sofia) do have an influence on her as we see towards the end of the film. I love exploration of characters and their worlds in any movie and this film really took me into Celie’s world – her quiet, pained struggle, her flickering hope to be reunited with her sister, her evolution of understanding about Sofia’s and Shug’s attitudes on
being female and being black and all their consequences. The movie also paints an elaborate, moving portrait of the 1900s South and what it was like to be a black person at that time in that place.
Although there is no avoiding the civil right issues and relationships between blacks and whites at that period, especially highlighted in the south, I like how this film centers around this particular black
community and their differing relationships with each other as opposed to devoting a large part of its time to the black-white community dynamic. There seem to be so few movies made about this subject – good thing this is a great one! Also special kudos to Shug, Oprah Winfrey’s character. The character arc we see in the movie, from independent gal to broken-down maid to
herself again is wonderful.
The only thing that kept this from going over the 4 star mark for me was that I couldn’t help but feel a “Hollywood gloss” over the movie that took me a bit out of the film – perhaps a twinge of melodrama here and a too-nice production set there that seemed out of place with the otherwise realistically gritty, impoverished south that the film seemed to want to depict.
Final Rating: 4 stars.
Audrey
