You don't know how much it pains me to have to
write "Color" instead of "Colour". It *kills* me.
dir: Blitz Bazawule
2023
Musicals. I try to be enthusiastic about them, but honestly, like most people (who aren’t Americans), I genuinely try to avoid them like, well, using the phrase “like the plague” seems tasteless after Covid killed so many millions of people.
So let’s just say I avoid them like the Cats musical they unleashed upon an unsuspecting world several years ago. Case in point, I have tried to sit through Cats multiple times, and I’ve never, ever been able to get through it, even during the worst of the lockdowns.
That was not a problem here. I knew it was a musical going in, and though I’ve never heard any of the songs before, I wasn’t overly dreading the experience.
I am old enough to remember the film when it came out in the 80s, directed by that most famous of African-American directors, Steven Spielberg, and starring Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, and the Empress of the Americas, being Oprah Winfrey, played Sofia.
I… have memories of that movie. I remember my school taking us along to the cinema to see it, which means I was in early high school. I remember being horrified by the scenes of what these days we call ‘intimate partner violence’, which used to be called ‘domestic violence’, which boils down to ‘a piece of shit guy physically abusing a woman’, which makes me sick to my stomach to even type. I have always looked askance at Danny Glover since then, having loathed him (unfairly) for how well he played the role of Mister.
My other memory of watching the original film involves watching it on the telly with my mother, who painfully, wrenchingly related to the scenes of domestic violence, and could transcend her usual racist tendencies to sympathise with the plights of the many African-American women in the story, but drew the line at Celie’s sapphic tendencies, declaring them a bridge too far, condemning everyone involved to hell itself.
Oh well, can’t win them all. So at the very least I’m familiar with the story, familiar enough to say that it’s a pretty melodramatic one, with some aspects that seem bizarre in retrospect, no matter how true in life they were to the original author, being Alice Walker.
It’s all very melodramatic and almost soap opera-ish. Does that sound like a criticism? If so, well, my point is that melodrama, which is drama at a somewhat heightened pitch, is very conducive to the musical format. Musicals are all about emotions expressed through song, and dance, to somehow entertain people, or get them to feel things for the characters.
Does that take a sad and painful story, and make it more palatable for a mass audience, appealing to more people at the expense of the source material, sanding off the brutal edges?
Well, yes, obviously. But I don’t think it really harms a story like this.
In 1909 or so, in Georgia, two girls climb trees and talk about their hopes and dreams, despite one of them being extremely pregnant. It’s strange that no-one talks about what’s going on there, or casts aspersions about who the father is, or castigates Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as the young Celie, Fantasia Barrino as the adult Celie) for being an unwed mother, given the time period.
It's Georgia, so… They have an absolute prick of a father, called Alfonso (Deon Cole), so when Celie gives birth and Alfonso steals the baby away to sell it, we can guess who the father is.
Everyone, including the so-called father, keeps saying that Celie is ugly as sin, and she believes it too, but her sister Nettie (Halle Bailey) is considered a beauty, so… I dunno, is there some kind of logic here? A terrible man on a horse, who calls himself Mister (Colman Domingo), tries to seduce Nettie from horseback, but eventually approaches her father for the purposes of marriage.
The terrible Alfonso ‘sells’ Celie to the despicable Mister instead.
Right from the outset he is brutal to her in all the ways an awful man can be brutal to a woman, and on top of that she is expected to look after his kids, and attend to his house under the threat of further brutality.
When Nettie flees from their father’s attentions, it’s only a matter of time before Mister tries to rape her as well, which she flees from, only to be told that if she ever tries to come and visit Celie again, Mister will shoot her with his shotgun.
On top of all his cruelties, he also has to keep Celie isolated and alone, so from that point on, unbeknownst to Celie for decades, he hides every letter that Nettie ever sends her.
You might wonder if this story is only going to keep heaping further miseries and misfortunes on Celie, but there are other characters to account for, and also ones who have self-belief and self-determination. Taraji P. Henson plays Shug Avery, which is funny to me, because the first time I saw her in a movie she played a character called Shug, way back in the day in Hustle and Flow. And she famously played a character called Cookie on that terrible series Empire, as well as a one-off character on The Simpsons called Praline, so I have a feeling she keeps being typecast as characters named after confectionary.
It’s like they’re trying to give her the diabetes. Shug is a blues singer, performing in juke joints, the daughter of a preacher, and beloved by Mister. There is a couple of lines of dialogue, as to why Mister beats Celie.
Why? Because she isn’t Shug.
Bleh. I hate lines like that, sad and affecting as they are. As if a piece of shit needs reasons to be cruel.
Shug is the complete antithesis of Celie, in that she does what she wants and gives zero fucks about anything, including what you would think would be the awkwardness of temporarily shacking up with an ex and being looked after by his wife, but she powers through it.
I don’t know if this version of the story, the movie-musical, downplays the attraction or the relationship between the two women, versus the stage production, versus the original movie, versus the original source material. There’s a scene where Shug sings the song “Miss Celie’s Blues” also known as “Sister”, and it’s delivered so pointedly, so raunchily that I think I might be a little bit pregnant now, having watched it. And Celie’s in no way confused about her attraction, which is bone deep.
And there’s other elements as well, but Shug can’t be tamed, she can’t be tied down, she’s going to fly wherever she wants, wherever the mood takes her and whatever other man she falls in with.
She can’t be relied on to free Celie from her bondage, well, not just yet.
Another woman arises in order to show Celie that there are other ways to live, being Sofia (Danielle Brooks), who at some stage is engaged to and/or pregnant with the child of Mister’s son Harpo (Corey Hawkins). Now Harpo, like any man, I guess, has the capacity, the potential to be a man as shitty as his father, and his father before him (a terrifying Louis Gossett Jnr, mostly because I can’t believe he’s still alive), but he doesn’t understand how to make her obedient.
He has seen Mister be casually cruel to Miss Celie over the years, but hasn’t put two and two together yet. He asks Celie how he can dominate Sofia, who is so much larger than life, and out of jealousy she suggests “Beat her”. It’s such a shameful moment, for us and for Celie. Having been treated so terribly for so long, she momentarily wishes harm upon another, and regrets it forever, especially after Sofia fights back against Harpo, and confronts Celie.
Shame, there’s so much shame to go around. See, up to this point, whether we argue about the original sin of slavery, the reality of Jim Crow laws in the Southern States, white supremacy is not the villain just yet. It’s the general shittiness of men and their treatment of women in relationships, specifically, considering the community these stories are set in, it’s the shittiness of certain African-American men towards women and their families.
It’s only loooooong into the flick before the horrors of institutional racism, and white people of ill-intent that will cause serious harm to our good people. What happens to Sofia is deeply unfair, but then every awful thing that happens to anyone in this flick, especially Celie, is deeply unfair.
But, since this is a melodrama, the first half of the whole enterprise, let’s say, is miseries being heaped on our characters, and the last half is the reversal, where good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people, who come to learn the error of their ways, and make amends, and come to terms with things
Will Celie and her dear sister Nettie be reunited? Will Celie and other people be reunited, people you didn’t think she’d ever see again?
Will everything be wrapped up with a neat, feel-good package?
Of course, but lest my cynicism dissuade you, I found this flick to be highly enjoyable and entertaining throughout, despite there being much material that freezes my blood and sickens me to my stomach. I guess the music and the songs are the sugar that make the medicine go down, but I also thought, well, the original film made me feel things, good and bad, and brought relief at the many character’s fates by the end, without the benefit of show stopping show tunes.
Yet this flick had me ugly-crying at the end, just, ack, horrible, at just how happy I was, and how relieved, that ‘everyone’ finds a measure of peace. Even if it’s stage-y, unearned and contrived, I didn’t care.
I did love the performances, I do admit. Fantasia as Celie is so wonderful, so sad, so hopeful. I hated it every time someone called her ugly, or she herself did so, thinking there’s no way that it can be true if you are with people who love you. Of course Taraji P. Henson takes over whenever she’s onscreen but that’s just how charismatic she is. Danielle Brooks is also a force of nature as Sofia, until something terrible happens to her, but even she finds time to shine again eventually.
The women shine in this film. It’s their film. It’s understandable that the male characters don’t stand out as much, seeing as they usually only have singular traits, most of which seem to align with bafflement in the face of womanhood. If I hadn’t seen Colman Domingo recently in a bunch of stuff, including as the lead in Rustin, I’d maybe loathe him so much that I would want to hiss at the screen. As Mister he’s a monster, but I think (eventually) this wonderful actor sneaks enough humanity into the portrait for his (absurd) reconciliation at the end to still resonate.
The director has form with this kind of material. You might think it unlikely that I would be familiar with a Ghanian filmmaker, but I’ve seen a film he made from 2018 (I think) called The Burial of Kojo, and far more recently something called Black is King, which is just hours of scenes of Beyoncé in many different costumes and wigs, intercut, in a disjointed mess that I am ashamed to say I could not finish.
What I recall from either is a director with a very strong visual style, with an eye towards composition and bold costuming choices, and perhaps a music film clip sensibility, which is probably appropriate for a musical movie. I can’t say I remember many of the songs from the movie (except maybe “Hell No” and “I’m Here”, and nor would I ever want to see this onstage, but I think the movie does justice to the story. It doesn’t shy away from the pain of its characters’ lives, but nor does it wallow in it, becoming far more of a celebration of family and life than you would think from a story that begins with such misery.
8 times and then there’s the beauty of the phrase of why it’s called The Color Purple, which I had forgotten out of 10
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“I may be black. I may be poor. I may even be ugly. But I'm here!” - The Color Purple
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