The Color Purple – joyful songs sharply contrast with the harrowing life of Celie Harris

Musical films are undergoing a renaissance at the box office with Wonka and Mean Girls getting high profile releases in recent months. Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple dives right in with an opening number featuring two sisters singing on the branch of a tree while a man playing a banjo rides past on a horse. Peak musical you may think … and that’s before a piano is played on the back of a horse-drawn carriage!. But it turns out the strumming minstrel will be an important antagonist throughout the next two hours twenty minutes of the film.

The Color Purple tracks the life of Celie Harris (played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and then Fantasia Barrino) over four decades starting in 1909 Georgia when as a teenager her abusive father forced her into an abusive marriage with a local farmer ‘Mister’ (Colman Domingo). Losing touch with her much-loved sister Nettie takes its toll. The arrival – and swift departure – of feisty daughter-in-law Sofia (Danielle Brooks) brings comfort followed by sadness. The visit of Mister’s old flame Shug (Taraji P. Henson whose character sure knows how to make an entrance) adds the sound of jazz to the neighbourhood but the outbreak of extramarital harmony in the home is fleeting.

While Celie’s life is harrowing for the majority of the film, the songs are upbeat and hold the promise that life could be so much better. Large-scale dance routines add a sense of vibrancy to the melancholic story of enslavement, violence and abuse. Ninety minutes in, the fightback begins and the tables are turned as Celie begins to live the life of promise and joy that she deserves.

Based more on the stage musical than Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film that adapted Alice Walker’s novel, this new version of The Color Purple isn’t full of hummable tunes. It’s a long watch, and perhaps ends with everything too well sewn up. You’ll leave the cinema with a heavy heart, wondering why no one intervened over the first two decades of Celie’s marriage, or the six years of Sofia’s incarceration, and whether the situation is still all too common today. Well worth seeing on the big screen. 

 

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