The Color Purple (1985)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
An epic tale spanning forty years in the life of Celie, an African-American woman living in the South who survives incredible abuse and bigotry. After Celie's abusive father marries her off to the equally debasing 'Mister' Albert Johnson, things go from bad to worse, leaving Celie to find companionship anywhere she can. She perseveres, holding on to her dream of one day being reunited with her sister in Africa.
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What critics compared The Color Purple to
That’s also where Erivo, a Tony winner for “The Color Purple,” who steals the show here and in the upcoming “Widows,” has her first chance to sing.
Erivo won a Tony for her performance in the recent Broadway revival of The Color Purple, but this and next month’s Widows are her first film roles.
Erivo, a Tony-winner for “The Color Purple,” is astounding, carrying a wisdom and world-weariness the others can’t manage.
And the actors always give you something to watch: Erivo is a soulful new presence in movies (she won a Tony for the stage production of “The Color Purple”), Hamm is in exuberant form and Bridges hunkers down for a sneakily sincere turn.
But it’s the spectacular Erivo, a Tony winner for The Color Purple, who takes the acting honors, throwing in a few delicious songs (“You Can’t Hurry Love,” “This Old Heart of Mine”) in between demonstrations of, well … they won’t allow us to tell.
Think of all the Shug Avery songs from “The Color Purple” (1985) except way more and from a multitude of performers…
We may be 400 miles from the rural Georgia setting of “The Color Purple,” but with traces of the KKK and the Deep South setting of “Sinners,” the Mississippi Delta, often referred to as “The Most Southern Place on Earth,” is familiar cinematic territory.
And if Terrence Malick would've been even better suited to adapt Alice Walker's novel, written as it is in the form of semi-literate, quasi-poetic letters reminiscent of Malick's Badlands and Days of Heaven narrators, Spielberg's classicism comes to be appreciated in a goosebumps-inducing send-off for Mister that brings to mind John Wayne's exit from another Ford classic, The Searchers.
At first I was going to pair this up in a review with Spielberg-idol John Ford's frothy The Quiet Man, which is nothing if not visually similar, until I realized I risked trivializing the former with such a coupling.
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Shallow and old-fashioned, “Memoirs of Geisha” is to the uniquely Japanese phenomenon what “The Color Purple” was to the African-American experience, a pretty but fake studio-bound movie, directed by an American director who looks at his distinctive characters from the outside.
Whoopi Goldberg ("Ghost," "The Color Purple") is decent as the standard, no nonsense but wise head nurse, while Jeffrey Tambor ("Meet Joe Black," HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show") and Vanessa Redgrave ("Howards End," "Julia") make brief appearances as facility doctors.
Since her memorable performance in "The Color Purple," she's been mired in macho formula.
Sam, in a desperate attempt to make contact with Molly, visits storefront spiritual adviser Oda Mae Brown, played by Whoopi Goldberg in her first good movie role since "The Color Purple."
As Oda Mae, she's finally found a role that combines the hipness of her standup act with a bit of the serious side she's shown in "The Color Purple" and "Clara's Heart," and she's made the most of it.
But it is also the kind of movie where the delightful Whoopi Goldberg - in her first decent role since 1985's The Color Purple - plays a bogus medium who, to her horror, discovers that she really has the gift.
Still, The Color Purple is unquestionably a work of heart and soul dazzlingly performed by Spielberg's tightest ensemble since Jaws--although familiarity has retroactively rendered Goldberg, then a complete unknown, an awfully unconvincing shrinking violet, and a scene in which she shimmies and blurts "ha-cha-cha!" in an outfit not unlike the one Oda Mae Brown wears to the bank in Ghost is an inexplicable harbinger of the Goldberg persona that momentarily zaps you out of the picture.
The 1868 Little Women didn’t make it to D. H. Lawrence’s survey Studies in Classic American Literature , yet it may be the ultimate story of blood sisterhood (rivaled only by Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple ).
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The film is almost courageously subversive, with the famous opening number " Circle of Life" (which has always reminded me, as Pauline Kael once remarked of the enchanted meeting between two churches from The Color Purple , of a fire drill) immediately followed by the smushing of a mouse and the villain, Scar, purring with Jeremy Irons' inimitable rasp, "Life's not fair, is it?"
Spielberg, known as a creator of iconic spectacles, has never shied away from looking at real pain, as in “Schindler’s List” and “The Color Purple.”
Based on the complex legal aftermath of an 1839 slave revolt, Amistad doesn't have the emotional heft of Schindler's List or The Color Purple , but it's a distinguished, well-acted historical drama.
One common denominator to the movies Spielberg has made over the second act of his career—after 1985’s The Color Purple saw him shift in spirit from film-brat showman to Serious Filmmaker, with all the laurels and prestige that implies—is a desire to examine the past using state-of-the-art means, which can, on the surface, look a bit like glossy and borderline-reactionary nostalgia.
With the exception of “The Color Purple,” the previous 27 had been scored by John Williams.
In another director’s hands, Bridge of Spies might have a more paranoiac edge, but this is Spielberg, though certainly in minor key, with a jarring Thomas Newman score taking the place of the expected swelling strings of John Williams (it’s the first Spielberg film Williams hasn’t scored since The Color Purple).
And while he's explored social issues before – from the misguided "The Color Purple" to the standout "Schindler's List" – lately he's done it in small, though still important ways, like the way "Lincoln" tried to give President Obama a hard lesson in political deal-making.
It's a lovely, complicated visual metaphor for abandonment or freedom, for Spielberg the scenarist's twin obsessions with the idea of little boys lost and of little boys escaping and for Spielberg the director's inability to take responsibility for his subtext so that he might finally make that mature film he's so desperately wanted to since The Color Purple .
Sad that the Spielberg of The Terminal seems content to engage in sequences of crude slapstick that, unlike Harpo’s numerous pratfalls in The Color Purple, are less a product of soulful insight then they are the mischievous diversions of a crowd-pleaser.
Sure, he’s got Meryl Streep in the lead, but that’s his first fully realized female topliner since The Color Purple in 1980-fucking-5, wasting the likes of Amy Ryan, Kathryn Morris, Amy Adams, Dakota Fanning, Cate Blanchett and Sally Field along the decades.
Spielberg's told enough stories of hopelessly broken homes (Close Encounters, The Color Purple), guys proving their worth (Duel, Schindler's List), and innocents making their way in a corrupt adult world (E.T., Empire of the Sun).
Spielberg gives the movie a snappy, glitzy gusto of the type that he gave his early chase films like The Sugarland Express and 1941, and it's refreshingly lacking in that heavy nobility he injected into The Color Purple and nearly every film since.
That's the metaphorical closet that Steven Spielberg has been trying to emerge from for the last 16 years, first with "The Color Purple" and "Empire of the Sun," and then with "Schindler's List," "Amistad" and "Saving Private Ryan."
From Close Encounters of the Third Kind, through the Indiana Jones series, The Color Purple, Schindler's List and Amistad he has, with varying degrees of success, meditated on issues like faith, life, and justice.
Granted, it is seldom that Spielberg has made a truly bad movie (Hook is likely his sole outright disaster), but I've never shaken the feeling that The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan , and even Schindler's List are always, ultimately, less faithful to their subject matter and less trustful in their audience than they should be.
The covert hostility he's shown toward this type of popcorn material ever since the critical failure of "The Color Purple" and "Empire of the Sun" dashed his hopes of graduating to "serious" themes is largely absent from "Jurassic Park," except for some wry, slyly subversive jabs at the lawyers and licensing departments that have become such a negative force in contemporary mass entertainment (thanks to merchandising-obsessed filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, of course).