The amazing experiment that is ‘The Color Purple’
I saw something last month I hadn’t seen in two decades of moviegoing: three Blackdirected films in one week.
I watched Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of “The Color Purple,” a musical about a female survivor overcoming sexual assault and domestic abuse; the concert film “Renaissance,” directed by and starring Beyoncé; and “Origin,” Ava DuVernay’s dramatization of Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling book “Caste.” Though each is starkly different in everything from story to aesthetic vision, my happenstance of seeing all three so close together revealed their shared interest in telling stories about African American history in new ways.
Beyoncé remembers the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s; DuVernay recognizes early African American researchers of race relations, like Allison Davis, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and Alfred L. Bright; and Bazawule looks at a 40-year period in the life of a Black woman living through Jim Crow and the Jazz Age.
That chance week of movies also allowed me to reflect on the unprecedented journey and ultimate cinematic triumph of “The Color Purple.” Starting in rural Georgia in the early 20th century, the story follows Celie, an orphaned girl who is repeatedly violated and twice impregnated by her Pa, a man she considers her father. She is forced to leave her younger sister, Nettie, when Pa marries her off to a much older widower, Albert, whom she knows only as Mister.
Centered on Celie’s finding her voice, discovering her sexuality in her relationship with blues singer Shug Avery, and her journey to forgiveness, selfhood and community with other women, like her daughter-in-law, Sofia, Walker’s novel earned her
the National Book Award and made her the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie adaptation earned 11 Oscar nominations; then came a Tony Award for the 2005 Broadway show and two for the 2015 revival, making it one of the most prized narratives in American history.
Nowadays, it is hard to believe that when Spielberg released his adaptation, he and Walker had to cross a picket line of protesters to attend the premiere. But his drama was met with great controversy. While researching my book “In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece,” I discovered that many critics, the majority of whom were Black male writers or political leaders, had accused the filmmakers of reinforcing stereotypes of Black men as hyperviolent through the characterizations of Pa, Albert and Harpo (Albert’s oldest son) and the abuse they inflicted on Celie and Sofia. Other critics took umbrage at Celie’s lesbian relationship as undermining traditional Black family values.
Led by Black organizations like the NAACP, the Nation of Islam and the now
defunct Coalition Against Black Exploitation, the campaign against that movie was bitter and divisive. In turn, its defenders, including many Black women who saw themselves in Walker’s characters, felt pitted against others in their own community. The pushback was so effective that the film won no Academy Awards. (It lost the top Oscar to “Out of Africa.”)
“Without a doubt the controversy is the reason we didn’t take home a single award that night,” Oprah Winfrey, who starred as Sofia in the original and later served as a producer of both the stage and movie musicals, told me in an interview in 2018. “I was puzzled and frustrated by the NAACP.”
And yet the film was groundbreaking, changing our understanding of what was possible for Black actors and stories in Hollywood. Ultimately, it paved the way for the new works by Beyoncé, DuVernay and Bazawule. And unlike its predecessor, Bazawule’s musical version, opening in theaters on Christmas Day, premieres alongside other films with predominantly Black casts, and so his “Color Purple” is free to re-imagine and experiment with form and conventional musical conceit.
Through Celie’s vivid inner life, the dynamic songs and choreography, and playful cinematic references, this version honors its literary, Broadway and Hollywood forerunners while successfully updating how we see Alice Walker’s characters and, even more surprising, innovating how we can experience the movie musical genre itself.
Arriving in a different feminist moment, Bazawule is not bedeviled by the sexist and homophobic concerns that plagued the first movie. And yet, his most memorable scenes subtly take on those past critiques while adding cinematic layers to Celie’s story. Early in the film, Celie’s active imagination — depicted in the novel through her letter-writing — is shown as both a coping mechanism and a surrealistic narrative detour. When the teenage Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) discovers that her children are alive after Pa convinced her that they had died, she dreams of avoiding the drudgery of her life.
Bazawule expands his surreal aesthetic when Celie and Shug go to the movies. Sitting in the segregated balcony section as they watch “The Flying Ace,” Richard E. Norman’s 1926 silent with an all-Black cast, Celie imagines them in a different movie — one in color in which they are dressed in ballgowns and singing to each other in front a Duke Ellington-like jazz band. When we return to the present, they kiss, cementing their relationship and finally enabling Celie’s fantasy to come true. In 1985, that kiss was brief and the cause of much public debate. With access to her inner thoughts in 2023, Celie’s hopes and desires become our own: We recognize her intimacy with Shug is long-awaited and fulfilling.