The Colour Purple (opening Christmas Day) is participating musical leisure, grounded in a slowly bending story arc of feminine empowerment. That’s a mixture that can discover favor with many moviegoers — although they should be forgiving of condensed and infrequently complicated storytelling, oddly abrupt transitions and a surfeit of song-and-dance sequences that land with little affect.
The brand new film will attain a bigger viewers than the stage musicals did (together with touring firms), an unassailable incontrovertible fact that doubles as financial justification. Extra necessary, expensive reader, is your relationship to Walker’s painful, joyous saga of resolute Southern Black girls within the first half of the twentieth century, and your opinion of the stage musical. How gritty, or shiny, do you prefer it?
Because the film opens in 1909, Celie and her sharp, protecting sister Nettie are cheerful and pragmatic youngsters in rural Georgia. Their abusive father has impregnated Celie twice, given away the infants and now sells her to Mister (Colman Domingo), a brutal, charming older farmer who caps his villainy by assaulting Nettie and chasing her away at gunpoint.
Because the years roll by with none information of her sister, Celie (Fantasia Barrino, displaying terrific vary) doesn’t insurgent in opposition to her depressing state of affairs. Luckily, two robust girls come into her circumscribed world and rattle her perspective. The liberated blues belter Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), Mister’s onetime lover, settles beneath their roof for a number of days, lengthy sufficient to kindle a spark with Celie. The fearless Sofia (Danielle Brooks), who marries Mister’s son Harpo, broadcasts her independence the second she hits the display screen and carves it in stone with the foot-stomping anthem “Hell No!”
The primary problem of adapting The Colour Purple — as with every story that entails subjugation and home violence — is portraying the characters’ struggling with out both glorifying (i.e., wallowing in it) or cheapening it. That’s an particularly robust tone to nail in a musical, however director Blitz Bazawule (co-director of Beyoncé’s Black Is King) succeeds in making us really feel the sting of Mister’s slaps and blows with out robbing Celie of our respect.