The Color Purple

Folks will make a musical out of anything these days, including — of all things — Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple.

While incest, rape, domestic violence, and racial injustice seem odd fits for the stage, amplified by song-and-dance numbers, they’re likewise bizarre when that retelling is adapted to the screen, a medium where Steven Spielberg and a cast led by Whoopi Goldberg already admirably told Walker’s story in straightforward dramatic fashion nearly 40 years ago.

Nevertheless, early on in director Blitz Bazawule’s cinematic shepherding of Marsha Norman’s book and Allee Willis’ music, there’s a sense that a Color Purple movie musical might not be such a bad idea. Big, bright production numbers take advantage of film’s potential and ably convey the mutual joy and love that teenage sisters Celie (newcomer Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) and Nettie (Halle Bailey, The Little Mermaid) feel for each other in hardscrabble early 1900s Georgia.

But their smiles just barely cover a deep underlying dread, and when Celie’s realities set in with her rapist father and eventual forced marriage to the violent Mister (Colman Domingo), the filmmakers struggle to mix the song-and-dance approach with the material’s heavy subject matter. In this frustrating atmosphere, even a vocalist as talented as Fantasia Barrino can only do so much as adult Celie, and Taraji P. Henson’s gifts are wasted on a watered-down interpretation of liberated jazz singer Shug Avery.

The Color Purple receives a needed jolt of energy from Danielle Brooks’ no-nonsense Sofia, but her magnetism isn’t enough to keep this ill-conceived project from feeling a good hour too long. The credits can’t roll soon enough, and when they arrive, they herald the end of something that makes Spielberg’s film look like a masterpiece.

Grade: C-minus. Rated PG-13. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: Warner Bros.)