Director Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of “The Color Purple” is an astonishing and herculean accomplishment in cinema. Blending the influences of every iteration that has come before it, from Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to Steven Spielberg’s 1985 Academy Award-nominated film to Marsha Norman’s 2005 Tony Award-winning musical stage play, the resulting work cuts to the core of the story in beautiful and shocking ways. It stands as one of the best films of the year.
TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT “THE COLOR PURPLE”
5. A Righteous Reclamation
In many ways, Blitz Bazawule’s “The Color Purple” feels akin to producer Steven Spielberg’s own musical reinvention from a few years ago, 2021’s “West Side Story.” In that film, Spielberg, co-writer Tony Kushner, and original lyricist Stephen Sondheim recontextualized decades-old source material into a vital and critically-of-the-moment work. It fully invested itself in the people who had always been the heart of that story: the Vasquez family.
Here, Blitz Bazawule and screenwriter Marcus Gardley wholeheartedly invest in exploring the wonders, horrors, and complexities of the lives of the Harris sisters in such an articulate fashion that it feels transcendent. Like “West Side Story” before it, “The Color Purple” is thus a righteous reclamation of the story by the people and culture at the very center of it, and it is achingly beautiful to watch.
Halle Bailey’s Nettie tells her sister around the film’s midpoint that “we are the center of the universe,” and in Bazawule’s film, this could not be more true.
4. A True Blue Musical
Another element that feels like a spiritual connection to Spielberg’s “West Side Story” is the bold, brazen musicality displayed here.
Over the course of the past few decades of film, people have relentlessly shied away from musicals. Creatives, executives, audiences, all of them, so much so that recent films such as this one have even shied away from openly marketing themselves as musicals. But delightfully, there has clearly been a swaying of the tide, at least on the creative end. Because “The Color Purple” could not be a more true blue musical than it is.
In adapting the songbook from Marsha Norman’s stage play, the film runs full-tilt into the opportunity to stage gargantuan dance numbers, huge emotive musicals, and allow an explicit sense of musicality to pervade throughout the entire film. It is absolutely incredible, with the songs and dance numbers being so wondrously charged with creative verve and storytelling vernacular in their own right. Each setpiece pushes the story, characters, and themes forward in integral ways, making for some stellar symphonic storytelling on the grandest of scales.
The musical is back, baby, and thank God for directors like Blitz Bazawule, who can stage and shoot the absolute shit out of standout sequences like this.
3. The Last Supper Sequence
Towards the end of the second act of “The Color Purple,” there is a pivotal dinner table-set sequence which acts as a penultimate crossroads for several of the film’s biggest narrative and thematic threads. It’s a huge ensemble scene, featuring a great portion of the film’s immaculate cast, and it is simply one of the greatest sequences of any film that I’ve seen this year.
It is overwhelmingly emotionally-charged, tense, side-splittingly hysterical at times, and also unbelievably satisfying. Narratively, it’s a crucial point that fundamentally changes the entire story moving forward, and thematically, it acts as the film’s purest distillation in visual language of exactly what it is looking to leave viewers with. It’s an astounding work of performance, writing, direction, editing, and scoring, as each separate facet of the filmmaking process interweaves with one another to create a perfectly-tuned symphony of emotional catharsis.
2. The Entire Cast
As mentioned, this cast is absolutely, unbelievably immaculate. Taraji P. Henson, Colman Domingo, Danielle Brooks, Corey Hawkins, Halle Bailey, and David Alan Grier—all of them deliver some of the finest work of their respective careers. And Fantasia Barrino as Celie? She is genuinely miraculous to bear witness to, a cinematic act of God unto herself.
The whole thing is a veritable smorgasbord of talent, a cup that is practically overflowing, with insanely sculpted, meticulous, and ultimately affecting performances each way you turn. And wonderfully, each of them is only heightened by the exquisite writing and the musical elements of the film, which allow them to step well outside their typical comfort zones and deliver some truly vulnerable work in spectacular fashion.
1. Blitz Bazawule
No one in this world could have delivered this version of “The Color Purple” like Blitz Bazawule does. Coming off the back of his shoestring-budgeted debut “The Burial of Kojo” and his big-budget musical film with Beyonce, “Black Is King,” Bazawule brings unbridled beauty, emotionality, and synchrony to “The Color Purple” that allows the film to soar.
Working alongside cinematographer Laustsen and editor Jon Poll, Bazawule and co. strike a perfect visual balance, capturing this story with gorgeous, wide-framed, full-bodied musicality in their own visual language with striking precision and power. Bazawule brings an overarching sense of symphonic storytelling to the proceedings, which binds the entire film together—every setpiece, every shot, every facet feels tangibly linked to one another through his construction of the visual tapestry, ultimately all tying into the film’s most profound themes. Bazawule finds beauty in the color of purple and in “The Color Purple” with aplomb to spare, and it is wonderful.
RGM GRADE
(A)
Blitz Bazawule’s “The Color Purple” is transportative. It swallows you whole and immerses you in the world of the Harris sisters, and over the span of two-and-a-half hours, you experience a lifetime of hardship, joy, pain, and beauty with them.
It’s a wonderful cinematic experience, and one that I must advise you to experience on the largest screen possible. It’s a film about finding God in the details, feeling the beauty of the world around you, and ultimately finding the courage and faith to make yourself the center of your own universe. And I can’t think of a better way to close out 2023 than that.
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