How does the third adaptation of The Color Purple hold up?

The Color Purple began as a story about the life of a Black woman in rural Georgia, from her traumatic childhood in the early 1900s to her cathartic reunion with her family 30 years later.

The novel by Alice Walker won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and was shortly after adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg. Twenty years later, the story was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical.

Now, The Color Purple is back in a new format: a movie musical. But how does the story translate back to the big screen, after being adapted three times over?

Culture critics Kathleen Newman-Bremang, Sarah-Tai Black and Rad Simonpillai join Commotion host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to review the latest iteration of Walker's novel, and whether it does the story justice.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Kathleen, I've got to say, the official slogan for this new Color Purple movie is, "A bold new take on the beloved classic." You are the biggest Fantasia Barrino fan on the planet. Does that slogan live up to the film?

Kathleen: I had a really amazing time in the theatre watching this reimagining, and yes my girl Fantasia gave the performance of a lifetime. Her and Danielle Brooks, I think I have never seen performances this great on screen ever, let alone last year. I think they were incredible. The film made me laugh, it made me cry uncontrollably; that is who I am. I loved the choreography. I loved the music. I think everyone should go see it.

Saying all of that, the answer to your question is no, I don't think it was a bold new take on the beloved classic as promised in that slogan. In Alice Walker's original text, the characters Celie and Shug Avery, played in this version by Fantasia and Taraji P. Henson, have a romantic relationship. They have a sexual relationship. In the film, that is reduced to a pretty chaste kiss, and their romance is more implied than explicit. Watering down that queerness of the original text is not bold to me. That was very disappointing…. It's a beautiful film that got a lot of things right, but the beauty of adapting and reimagining classics now is to take risks, I think, and to be more inclusive. So what is the point of remaking The Color Purple in 2023 if it can't be gay as hell? I just don't understand that choice.

Elamin: I just wanted to admire the elegance of you saying, "Look, if Fantasia Barrino has 100 fans, I am one of them. If the world is against Fantasia Barrino, I'm against the world. My girl did great, but I have problems with the movie." That's your general position.

Kathleen: Exactly! Yes, correct.

Elamin: Sarah-Tai, I mentioned that this version of The Color Purple has a deeply impressive cast, right? We're talking about Fantasia. We're also talking about H.E.R. We're talking about Halle Bailey. Did the idea of adapting this into a musical work for you?

Sarah-Tai: I was apprehensive, but open. Kind of on the same train as removing the queer context, it felt a bit like watching a musical — not to stereotype — where there were too many straight people involved. There are so many songs that seem like [they're] still in draft mode, and the quality I find gets noticeably more undercooked as the film continues, which is a shame because Fantasia —- I was not a Fantasia fan before this; I knew Kathleen was — she put her foot in this performance.

Kathleen: Yes, she did.

Sarah-Tai: And that's why it's so unfair that the staging of this musical was so hokey and at times really disconnected from the world of the film…. It felt like the film wasn't on Celie's side in the beginning, and you really need the film to be on Celie's side in order to pull off a story like this successfully. I think, also, these beloved characters like Sofia and Shug Avery — who are so, so well cast here with Danielle Brooks and Taraji P. Henson — both of them are not the strongest dramatic actors, but they have so much charisma and such great comedic timing. Danielle Brooks's song busted this film in a good way; that was great. But Taraji's song, that was something where we should have had not just the queerness of it, but the emphatic, glossy chutzpah. The choreography should be on point. It should be hot, but it was kind of just sizzling.

Elamin: So this is the odd thing, Rad, about taking a piece of work through so many different adaptations. This musical comes out in 2004, runs on Broadway for three years, is revived in 2013 and brought to Broadway in 2015. It has had a lot of lives. Danielle Brooks was in the Broadway revival of the show, and plays the same character in this film. But by the time you sit down you're like, "OK, I'm trying to accept this as a thing that is coming to me in the medium of film, but also as a musical." You're asking a lot of the material to go through so many different filtrations. Did it work for you?

Rad: Well, it didn't work for me, and I think what you're saying there is interesting, because I think we do have a different receiving mechanism when we're on Broadway. When you get a film and you get close-ups, you want more authentic emotion…. My initial reaction is these musical numbers seemed to be getting in the way of the emotions of the story. The Color Purple, the Steven Spielberg movie, leaned into the trauma of it all. So there is this aspect of this story now trying to lean into the joy by leaning into the musical numbers and kind of taking less risks with the more dramatic, traumatic content. The right way to have gone about that, if you did want to have more joy in it, then yes, like Kathleen said, lean into the queer story. Lean into that love story.

But here, it felt like the musical numbers existed in a different world from the story, and it just struggled to marry the two. It's hard to do trauma in a musical. I think the one movie that took all the risks that managed to pull that off was Cabaret, right? This movie couldn't do that. So by the time you get to this emotional catharsis at the end, it didn't feel cohesive. It didn't feel like the emotional catharsis belonged to the people that the story belonged to.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.