Books, Arts & Manners: Black and White in Purple

What is an insuperable problem for a filmmaker who specializes in gadgets, sentimentalized children, and cute creatures from outer space? Adults —anything at all to do with grownups living their quotidian lives. To be sure, this is a problem for Hollywood as a whole; it is more intensely so for Steven Spielberg, for whom becoming a movie director seems to have been the surest way of trading in his toys for bigger and bigger toys while (in a juvenile version of The Picture of Dorian Gray) remaining himself forever small. In The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker’s novel, the toys have become suffering human beings—blacks in rural Georgia between 1906 and 1940—and the film has become an infantile abomination.

Miss Walker’s novel—far from the literary masterpiece it has been hyped into and unable to transcend the two humanly legitimate but artistically burdensome chips on its shoulder, feminism and black militancy—is still much better than the film, for which it wasn’t suited. An epistolary novel, it thrives on the intimacy of one-to-one verbal confrontation, something that even maturer hands than Spielberg’s could not have transposed onto film. But who would have expected The Color Purple, with its bitter hostility toward male blacks, and whites of either sex, to have the psychology of a Dumbo or Pinocchio, its feminist and lesbian coloration lost in a mise en scène doing its damnedest to look like a cartoon film, and pretty nearly succeeding.

JS

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John Simon

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What is an insuperable problem for a filmmaker who specializes in gadgets, sentimentalized children, and cute creatures from outer space? Adults —anything at all to do with grownups living their quotidian lives. To be sure, this is a problem for Hollywood as a whole; it is more intensely so for Steven Spielberg, for whom becoming a movie director seems to have been the surest way of trading in his toys for bigger and bigger toys while (in a juvenile version of The Picture of Dorian Gray) remaining himself forever small. In The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker’s novel, the toys have become suffering human beings—blacks in rural Georgia between 1906 and 1940—and the film has become an infantile abomination.

Miss Walker’s novel—far from the literary masterpiece it has been hyped into and unable to transcend the two humanly legitimate but artistically burdensome chips on its shoulder, feminism and black militancy—is still much better than the film, for which it wasn’t suited. An epistolary novel, it thrives on the intimacy of one-to-one verbal confrontation, something that even maturer hands than Spielberg’s could not have transposed onto film. But who would have expected The Color Purple, with its bitter hostility toward male blacks, and whites of either sex, to have the psychology of a Dumbo or Pinocchio, its feminist and lesbian coloration lost in a mise en scène doing its damnedest to look like a cartoon film, and pretty nearly succeeding.