This divisive new musical adaptation is also a lousy movie.
The angry-women song “Hell, No!” in the movie-musical adaptation of The Color Purple seeks a hostile response from viewers that is different from anything in Alice Walker’s original epistolary novel or Steven Spielberg’s marvelous 1985 classic film. This new version has been produced by Oprah Winfrey according to the opportunism of Black Lives Matter and vengeful #MeToo feminism.
Winfrey has gone way past Walker’s sisterhood folktale of Celie. A poor black teenage girl in 1909 Georgia, Celie is raped by her father and then gives birth to two children who are taken away from her while she is indentured to an abusive man named Mr.; then she is separated from her loving sibling, Nettie. Spielberg brought out the Dickensian qualities of this survivor’s story while subtly preserving Walker’s affirmation of female empowerment: the lesbian subplot in which Celie finds confidence through the loving attentions of a female blues singer, Shug Avery. It was such a mainstream breakthrough that the film endeared itself to audiences outside Hollywood and feminist academia, in spite of its rejection by the critical cognoscenti.
Wildly affirmative reviews for this new version, based on Winfrey’s 2004 Broadway musical retread, emphasize the gender and racial credits of its cast and crew. That’s the divisiveness implicit in “Hell, No!” — the middling show’s most rousing tune. Sung by the bodacious character Sofia (the role Winfrey originated in 1985, now essayed by Orange Is the New Black actress Danielle Brooks), the song not only confronts male authority and domestic violence, but its repetitive chorus rejects traditional male–female companionship.
This coarsened narrative focus violates the forgiveness and familial union that gave Spielberg’s film warmth — and made it popular. Winfrey’s musical reworking of The Color Purple is essentially tuneless and unpleasant. It has been directed by unskilled Nigerian filmmaker Blitz Bazawule, crudely written by Marcus Gardley, and performed by a cast of second-rate performers as if in conscious distrust and defiance of Spielberg’s crowd-pleasing movie, as if it were a monument to white achievement that needed to be torn down. Bazawule and Gardley pander to the punitive misandry that targets black men and that has recently ridded America of once-prominent black cultural figures Bill Cosby and R. Kelly, making black matriarchy dominant instead, as in movies from Wakanda Forever to The Woman King.
“Hell, No!” asserts the bitterness that’s always been just beneath the surface of Winfrey’s despotic feminism and sly race-baiting.
This unnecessary remake of The Color Purple seems additionally driven by the BLM impetus to dismantle the family unit and disintegrate the culture. (Bazawule’s juke-joint building scene pits feckless black men against industrious black women.) Visually unimpressive, this version lacks a musical’s potential for emotional enhancement (as opposed to the impact in Spielberg’s movie of Allen Daviau’s ebullient imagery, which ’80s racists termed “Disneyfied”). In Bazawule’s version, every point about black and female subjugation is made over-obvious in the manner of Millennial grievance.
These singing and dancing minstrels are not more realistic than Spielberg’s characters; they’re historical exaggerations: Black girls are introduced lounging in tree limbs like the symbolic feminists in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady; they wear long white dresses like the Gullah women in Daughters of the Dust. Rural blacks live in huge houses, attend enormous church edifices where excessively choreographed gospel celebrations rival the cartoon bacchanalia of The Blues Brothers. Prisoners in stripes sing a chain-gang song, pounding sledgehammers in dirt with no railroad tracks. And the bisexual coming-out of Celie and Shug (Fantasia Barrino and Taraji P. Henson) is blatant rather than compelling and compassionate.
The ultimate offense comes from Bazawule and Gardley’s apparent ignorance of black American culture in the post–Civil War era. They replace Spielberg’s discreet sexual sensitivity with flagrancy. A ludicrous black-and-white dance number shows the women going on a movie date where they fantasize themselves as Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers figures twirling atop a giant gramophone disc, Busby Berkeley–style — correcting Old Hollywood’s neglect but ignoring the indefatigable raw energy of the era’s race movies. More crudely, Henson’s “Push the Button” bumps and grinds Sapphic intercourse minus emotional intimacy, backed by a chorus line’s slo-mo rip-off of Bob Fosse’s “Air Erotica” in All That Jazz.
Bazawule, Gardley, and Winfrey’s iconoclastic gimmicks keep them from appreciating how Spielberg repurposed Hollywood tropes — from D. W. Griffith and Fannie Hurst to John Ford, King Vidor, and Douglas Sirk — to update and illuminate an epic black story as part of the American saga.
I could fill a second volume of Make Spielberg Great Again detailing how Winfrey fails to justify The Color Purple as black cinema. This film insults the idea of American culture by prescribing race-based, segregated film incompetence. Spielberg’s participation in this ruse suggests a guilt-ridden white liberal’s attempt to erase himself “for the greater good,” yet that would require Winfrey and her black army to match or improve Spielberg’s imaginative and moving vision. (It lost the Oscar in 1986 to the now-forgotten colonialist romance Out of Africa.)
Back in 1985, when Spielberg’s film stirred controversy because of its radical daring, the great maverick Melvin Van Peebles defended Spielberg’s artistry, saying, “I only wish I could have directed the film as well as he did.” Now, this pallid Color Purple epitomizes the artistic dearth of an era when a cultural mountebank like Winfrey uses race and feminist guile to cheat us of America’s most creative achievements.