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The Color Purple Movie Review

The Color Purple is a 2023 musical historical drama film directed by Blitz Bazawule and starring Fantasia Barrino, Tajari P. Henson, Danielle Brooks and Colman Domingo. It’s such a well acted, but badly directed feature.

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“It’s time for you to see the world!“

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Torn apart from her sister and her children, Celie faces many hardships in life, including an abusive husband. With support from her friends, she ultimately finds extraordinary strength in the unbreakable bonds of a new kind of sisterhood. The movie is not based on the titular novel and it’s not really a remake of the first Spielberg movie, but it’s based on a stage musical of the same name, thus it’s a different kind of adaptation that ultimately mostly worked.

I have never been a fan of the 1985 movie. I find it to be weak, uninspired and very boring. This movie, on the other hand, was much more engaging to me personally and more emotionally powerful. It benefits from a particularly strong cast with each and every performer delivering stellar work. Some like Halle Bailey and Corey Hawkins are forgettable, but the main stars were all incredible.

Fantasia Barrino is so effective and moving in the role of Celie. It is hard to imagine that this is her feature debut as she’s so good here. Taraji P. Henson is reliably terrific and very memorable and charismatic throughout. But Danielle Brooks as the fearless and admirable Sofia is the standout of the cast and her character is the most inspiring and tragic of the bunch. She stole the movie from everybody else, which was no small task.

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This The Color Purple is very much a musical. In fact, it has so many songs that it is definitely an acquired taste. It was at first odd to see a musical version of such a dark tale, but this has been done before, most notably with 2012’s ‘Les Miserables’. At the end of the day, I’d come to fully appreciate this choice as it led to a more emotionally engaging and eclectic film.

I’m Here is among the standouts. This song is so moving, inspirational in its lyrics and gorgeously sung. Hell No! is also very good while Push Da Button is lively and fun. There is this interesting mix between gospel songs and more Broadway-inspired pop tunes that worked, but too often most numbers seemed too similar to each other and true show-stoppers were absent here.

The Color Purple is at its best during the musical and emotional moments. The choreography is strong, the singing is superb and every single performer did their best during those numbers. The cinematography and score are terrific and the movie has stunning scenery for sure. However, the reason why it never reached greatness lies in the direction from Blitz Bazawule, which is so pedestrian, mediocre and uninspired that he never managed to elevate the source material to a cinematic status. It at times genuinely resembled a music video instead of a feature film and that was a big problem that the movie never overcame. Couple that with bad editing and poor pacing and you’ve got a technically rather troublesome production.

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