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THE COLOR PURPLE: A MOVING YET CONFLICTING ADAPTATION OF ALICE WALKER’S BOOK

However, something is amiss in the film. It is hard to say if this is because of the format of a musical and how the story was adapted to suit it – the director takes a devastating novel and

attempts something playful, which leaves you confused. Some serious sequences may come through as comic, as much as that not being the film’s intention. 

The lives of every woman in _The Color Purple_ are bitterly hard. It is between the implacable rule of men and the rule of race where Celie, her younger sister Nettie, Shug, and Celie’s

daughter-in-law Sofia build their unique brand of resistance in the book. At just over 300 pages, their affection and clashes with one another are built up at a perfect tempo. In the film,

many of these connections come together in quick-cut moments of Black sisterhood. The scenes are poignant for their rarity on screen and the beauty of the dark-skinned Black women they

celebrate. But something is missing.

As a musical, the film carries the feel of a stage production than a film, but never has the intimacy of a theatre piece, except in the exchanges between Celie and Shug. Rather, characters

from the book come and go, singing, sassing, crying, and dancing their way through the story until you feel more and more dislocated from the book. Writing this review, I was struggling to

articulate why the film left me deeply conflicted. The musical format could be a move to signify resistance to Black trauma—to sing defiantly instead. But for an audience who has never read

the book, the sheer weight of the violence from Celie’s husband and father hardly registers amidst the rush to get to the singing. 

Speilberg’s 1985 adaptation was divisive too, to say the least—a white director’s role in telling the story of Black women’s pain in the face of pre-existing stereotypes of Black men left

many split on how to view the politics of the story. After the film came out, The New York Times ran a piece titled ‘_Blacks in Heated Debate over The Color Purple_’. The debate, NYT

reported, was more or less split between Black women, who said it accurately depicted their own experiences, and Black men (and some Black women) who said it “distorts history”. Speilberg’s

film was traumatising – it translates with numbing detail the abuses Celie faces but dilutes the romance between her and Shug. 

Spielberg and Whoopi Goldberg (the 1985 film’s Celie) have now co-produced Bazawule’s iteration. Maybe how to adapt a book as historic, shattering, and iconoclastic as this, will always

leave us with a tumult of emotions. But in trying to understand Bazawule’s work, I am looking at a copy of Walker’s _The Color Purple _and I can only say that the film felt a bit like the

Disney version.