The Color Purple (2023)

Uplifted by song and dance, the tormented Celie's overcoming leaps from the screen

Celie (Fantasia Barrino) and Shug (Taraji P. Henson) share a transforming mutual support

The Color Purple (2023)

In theaters

The buoyant, infectious number “Keep it Movin’” is heard about 20 minutes into this resplendent new musical, and it gives the movie precisely what it needs, translating its characters and their condition into song.

The irony is that these people are in trouble, their circumstances dire.  Nothing to sing about, it would seem.  So, this jaunty song gives a warm jolt to a story set amongst distressingly poor Blacks in the early 20th century Deep South.  Suddenly the words “keep moving” shimmied through my mind as I swayed in my seat.

What was I assenting to?  Up to this moment the grim story of Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi), a girl not out of her teens, had been peppered with misery.  But her spunky sister Nettie (Halle Bailey), a slightly older teenager, with this song seizes a moment to lift Celie out of despair.

As the girls bounce and hand-jive along a gorgeous beach on the Georgia coast in 1903, Nettie is tossing the careworn Celie a lifeline, a vital lesson.  Joy sometimes has to be spun out of nothing, absolutely nothing.

The bond of sisters Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) and Nettie (Halle Bailey) is sorely tested across time

The whole movie is insisting on pretty much the same thing.  Across 2 hours and 21 minutes, we watch Celie cling for dear life to a near vanishing hope.  Lordy, what this embattled Black woman goes through!

While still a teenager she bears two children by Alfonso (Deon Cole), who claims to be her father (we later learn this isn’t true; he wasn’t actually her father).

This vicious exploiter gives away both of Celie’s babies hours after they’re born, then heartlessly marries Celie off to the conniving Mister (Colman Domingo), a sadistic tobacco farmer who beats Celie whenever it crosses his mind, mires her in household drudgery and callously uses her for malicious sexual gratification.

Celie endures this torment for nigh on two decades.  Domingo makes Mister stunningly enraging, a moral monster who exults in his cruelty and seems almost beyond sympathy.  It’s a bravely uncompromising performance where, astonishingly, the human being underneath the ogre can still be glimpsed.

Even the cruelly sinister Mister (Colman Domingo) isn’t totally beyond redemption

But it takes years for that human being to finally emerge.  In the long meanwhile, for all the ravaging and abuse Celie endures, she doesn’t remain a victim, either in this story or in the place the character has come to occupy in African American folklife.

Celie withstands a lot.  Yet over the years her resilience has come to stand for a lot of very different women’s hard-won liberation.

Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple had become a Black feminist beacon by the time Steven Spielberg filmed it in 1985.  Both works formed the basis for a 2005 Broadway musical, which ran three years and was revived in 2015 for a two-year run.

That’s a lot of presentations, and in this new movie musical, Celie’s story could have seemed overfamiliar, with its distress call about Black female empowerment by now squarely embedded in the American mind.  Celie’s tale of sorrow didn’t need just another re-telling.  It cried out for amplification.

That’s what it gets here.  I didn’t see either Broadway version, but here music and dance imprint Celie more deeply on our moral imaginations than the 1985 movie did.  It boasts a bigger sound and a wider visual scope.  And in the midst of anguish, irrepressible elation keeps bubbling up.

The camera here is shamelessly kinetic.  It dips and glides with the characters’ ups and downs, pulling us along in a way Spielberg’s masterly dramatic cinematography didn’t quite pull off.  He made a warm, stately, deeply respectful movie.

This one, on the other hand, is a shambling, rousing, jumpy exercise.  It can’t seem to sit still.  That rambunctiousness mostly works.  It’s fun to follow and to watch closely.  The production design is meticulously authentic, from small town rural Georgia to plush Memphis opulence.

The ramped-up grandiosity stokes the characters’ drives, rubs both their travails and turns of fortune right in our faces.  (To his credit, Spielberg is one of the producers of this musical version, and two of the first movie’s other producers, Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones, also produce here.)

Fantasia Barrino as the adult Celie has a robust, beautifully gauged singing voice.  It can range from whispery soft to full-throated, but as mighty as she can be, her singing never feels pumped up and loud.

She’s also a craftily subtle actress.  Her Celie cowers before Mister with such conviction we feel sick watching her.  When she breaks free and becomes a businesswoman, her appreciation for what it’s taken her to overcome is quietly touching.

Yet when Barrino sings, we see the power in Celie unleashed.  Interestingly, Celie doesn’t sing when Mister is on camera until the sensational moment when she announces she’s leaving him.

Thereafter, Barrino’s voice grows richer and more piercing with every number.  Her climactic cry “I’m Here” fervently raises the roof.

We also feel the force of women coming into their own in the rise and renewal of two gutsy women in Celie’s life.

One is Sophia (Danielle Brooks), wife to Mister’s son Harpo (Corey Hawkins).  She’s hot-tempered and can’t be quelled by the men in her life or, ultimately, by the domineering whites who nearly break her.

The defiant Sophia (Danielle Brooks) won’t let men or white power keep her down

They almost succeed, but Sophia fights for her dignity, and after a long imprisonment for challenging white privilege, she wins it.

Brooks is both funny and riveting, in a fierce number sung with other downtrodden women (“Hell No”) and in her final embrace of inner peace after release from prison.

The other female warrior is the pistol-hot blues singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), an old flame of Mister’s who returns to the little Georgia hamlet where most of the story is set.  She and Celie form an unexpected bond that turns sexually intimate but is mostly built on mutual respect.

Shug gets some of the movie’s most potent numbers, including a charged sexual anthem (“Push Da Button”) and a lilting blues paean to Celie put across with tasty New Orleans flair (“Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister)”), accompanied on piano by musical great Jon Batiste as Shug’s husband Grady.

Celie’s break from a toxic abuser gives the movie its overall sense of emancipation, not just from male privilege and cruelty, but from the role that for centuries life in the South has allotted to Black women:  dependable servants of men and the Lord, but never mistresses of their own destinies.

Henson makes Shug almost scarily alluring, like an enticing drug one could greedily get addicted to.  It’s a gripping performance because the actress seems to be pushing her own limits right along with the character’s.

Other numbers like the call to worship at the opening, “Mysterious Ways”; the arrival of Shug to put on her show in Harpo’s juke joint (“Shug Avery”); and the duet sung by Celie and Shug (“What About Love?”) make for fine renditions, but to me they seemed a bit over-scaled.  It’s one of the movie’s few misjudgments.

This story is about modest country folk with an inner strength that sees them through.  But director Blitz Bazawule sometimes stretches the singing and choreography to extremes, and the screen grows busy with excellent dancing that’s a bit too “done”, so sharply angled it can sometimes become more fantastically watchable than actually exhilarating.

This is Bazawule’s second movie, and he’s impressively upped his game, swinging for the fences.  The resulting feat is hugely panoramic yet stirringly tight. Grand, but nicely controlled.

A seasoned musician born in Ghana, Bazawule lends the movie a galloping American thrust.  You sense a lively Black community in the Georgia scenes, and a sophisticated urban Black environment when the focus shifts to Memphis.

But occasionally the transfixing dance movements feel too large and emphatic.  Now and then it seems as if we’re not beholding people’s resilience as much as we’re being pummeled with it.

That’s not unwelcome — the rebounding joy is infectious — but it can throw the movie’s message slightly out of whack.  Celie’s story celebrates inner steadfastness, not wailing, histrionic fortitude.  The “celebrating” here sometimes gets a trace too gaudy, when a slightly cooler approach might have actually made the message run deeper.

In the climactic “I’m Here”, an implacable Celie (Fantasia Barrino) declares she’s not been defeated

But it goes deep enough.  This is a self-consciously Black movie musical with a particular emotional, even political, charge that we rarely see expressed so fulsomely in movies, not just in carefully chosen words and feelings but through soul-shaking song and dance.

The Color Purple is strong enough and smart enough not to rely solely on its urging of empowerment, important as that message is.

As Celie announces near the end, quite simply, she’s here.  America needs to know that the Celies in the country are still here and aren’t going anywhere.  This movie would have us know they remain right where they want to be, in our faces.