Steven Spielberg (1985)

Anticipating the film’s release, Spielberg was quoted in The New York Times as feeling anxious about ‘doing a movie about people for the first time in my career’.   It seems unlikely that he really thought he hadn’t made a human-centred film before this one but The Color Purple, adapted by Menno Meyjes from the prize-winning novel by Alice Walker, was certainly a change of tack.  The director’s understandable apprehension turned out to be both unjustified and justified.   The Color Purple did very well commercially and received or was short-listed for many awards – although it won none of the eleven Oscars for which it was nominated.  The same thing had happened to The Turning Point only eight years previously but, more notoriously, Spielberg wasn’t even nominated for the Best Director Oscar in spite of winning the Screen Directors Guild award for the film.  (This was a first at the time.  Only Ron Howard for Apollo 13 (1995) and Ben Affleck for Argo this year have so far followed in Spielberg’s footsteps.  Argo is the only film to have won both the Best Picture Oscar and what’s now the Directors Guild of America award with no Oscar nomination for the director.)   The history of the Academy Awards is littered with decisions which are surprising at the time and ludicrous in retrospect but on this occasion the SDG look to be the ones who got it wrong.   The Color Purple is chaotic – much worse than I remembered (having seen it once before, probably around 1990) – and the uncharacteristically uncertain direction is the root cause.

Spielberg’s need to prove to his audience that he is dealing with ‘grown-up’ themes makes the first twenty minutes or so of The Color Purple tough to watch.   The story, which is set mostly in rural Georgia, begins in 1909 (and ends in the 1940s).   The heroine Celie (played as a teenager by Desreta Jackson and as an adult by Whoopi Goldberg, in her first substantial screen role) gives birth to her second child.  Like her first, this one’s father is also her own father (although it eventually transpires that this man was Celie’s stepfather).   The baby daughter to whom she gives birth at the start of the film is taken away from Celie, as her baby son also was.   A young widower called Albert Johnson (Danny Glover), referred to mostly as ‘Mister’, wants to marry Celie’s prettier sister Nettie (Akosua Busia) but the girls’ father says that only Celie is on offer and  Albert accepts that offer.  From the start of their marriage he treats Celie more or less as a slave and as something to have sex with, and he often physically abuses her.  Nettie comes to live with the household to avoid the sexual depredations of her father but she soon has to contend with Albert instead and, when she refuses to have sex with him, he throws her out.  This prologue, which ends with the separation – for a second time – of the two sisters, is a catalogue of physical and sexual violence.  Although it’s gruelling – and although Spielberg is stressing too soon the resilient humanity of Celie and Nettie (with their melting smiles and tears and injections of Quincy Jones’s supposedly uplifting music) – the opening section of The Color Purple is at least coherent.

Once Spielberg moves into the main narrative of Celie’s marriage and personal development, he begins to interleave slabs of racial drama with broad comedy sequences.  It’s hard to dismiss Albert easily after watching his violence towards Celie and Nettie but there are tired, unfunny displays of his domestic ineptitude:  trying to get himself dressed up to meet Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), the Honky Tonk singer Albert’s crazy for;  attempting to cook breakfast for Shug when she comes to stay.  I’ve not read the novel:  perhaps Spielberg and Menno Meyjes were trying to reproduce a world of teeming incident and rapidly shifting moods that Alice Walker creates on the page but, if so, the effect on screen is very clumsy.   I’m more inclined to think that, while conscientiously describing the trials and tribulations of Celie and the other women in this feminist story (most notably Albert’s dauntlessly feisty daughter-in-law Sofia (Oprah Winfrey)), Spielberg was also straining to find warmth and humour in the material.   The Color Purple is supposedly faithful to the original so perhaps the climax – even Albert plays his part in effecting Celie’s reunion with Nettie and the children she hasn’t seen since their birth – is not an invention on the part of the film-makers.   But because a happy ending – if possible, a happy family ending – is just what you’d expect Spielberg to be determined to deliver (at this stage of his career, anyway), it feels as if he’s engineered it.     The fields of flowers that are a recurrent image of beautiful hope in The Color Purple begin to reflect instead what seems to be Spielberg’s tendency to prettify.  This film was also a first for him in that it focused on African-American lives, and there’s an unfortunate convergence of his own childlike quality and the Hollywood tradition of presenting black characters as lovably simple.

The novel is not inordinately long (around 300 pages) and the film is lengthy (154 minutes) but you sometimes get the impression that it’s been rather desperately abbreviated:  Spielberg’s storytelling here is less fluent than in any other picture of his that I can bring to mind.   If he was anxious to de-emphasise the lesbian aspect this was a bad decision.  It’s unclear in the film that the growth in Celie’s self-confidence is closely connected to her sexual relationship with Shug Avery – Celie is painfully awkward and timorous for the best part of two hours then abruptly becomes articulate and self-possessed.   (Her wardrobe in the later stages suggests equally sudden wealth – after she’s escaped from Albert, Celie starts up a successful dressmaking business in Tennessee but, even allowing for that, the transition is instant.)   Sofia, who spends years in prison for striking a white man, sits at a Thanksgiving dinner table years later grey-haired, drowsy and confused – misery seems to have caused her to lose her mind.  She perks up as soon as Celie starts to speak hers and appears to be in fine health in all her subsequent scenes.

There’s a good deal of hurried, heavy-handed exposition in the closing stages.  According to the plot synopsis of the novel on Wikipedia, Alice Walker gives much more coverage to Nettie’s life as a missionary in Africa (with Celie’s two children there too).  In the movie, there’s no news of Nettie until one of the letters she’s been regularly sending finds its way, thanks to Shug, into Celie’s hands instead of Albert’s.  Celie then discovers the stash of letters which he’s kept hidden from her.  (It seems unlikely that he would have kept these rather than destroying them immediately – perhaps the pretext is that he’s always had a grain of human kindness in him …)  Spielberg then begins to cross-cut between Nettie’s descriptions of life in Africa and Celie’s back in Georgia.  There’s a particularly lurid example of this in an episode featuring Celie’s children undergoing some kind of tribal initiation in Africa and Celie, who has to shave Albert every day, preparing to cut her husband’s throat (she’s prevented by Shug, who has a premonition and gets remarkably quickly from out in the fields to stay Celie’s hand on the razor).  This cross-cutting is unfortunately typical of Spielberg’s approach in parts of The Color Purple, creating crudely effective ‘filmic’ suspense but cheapening the material being used for that purpose.    I didn’t understand anyway why Celie gets increasingly murderous feelings towards Albert (she goes for him with the carving knife for the Thanksgiving turkey too) just at the point at which she’s discovered that Nettie is still alive and where her children are – and that she herself therefore has something to live and hope for.

Both Desreta Jackson and Whoopi Goldberg interpret Celie’s cowering shyness and innocence too deliberately.  Although occasionally touching, they take an age to complete a gesture or expression:  perhaps in an attempt to keep Celie’s intelligence under wraps, they suggest instead that she can move her limbs and facial muscles only very slowly.   Whoopi Goldberg is much better once Celie begins to assert herself and the tempo of her behaviour is closer to Goldberg’s own quick-wittedness as a performer.   Her final scream of ‘Nettie!’ when she sees her sister again is affecting, even though the arrangement of the other women on Celie’s porch at the start of this sequence is bizarre (are nearly all the main characters living together by now?)   Margaret Avery makes a strong impression in her early scenes as Shug but there’s so little connection between these and most of her later appearances – where Shug (short for ‘Sugar’) is soignée and supportive in a rather bland way – that I really thought this was a different character at first.   Rae Dawn Chong barely registers as a younger, mixed-race woman, Squeak, who wants to be a singer like Shug.   Although the trajectory of Sofia’s recovery is baffling, Oprah Winfrey is consistently vivid:  she gives a lift to nearly every scene she’s in.  Sofia is let out of jail to work as a maid and car driver for the breathlessly neurotic Miss Millie, played by Dana Ivey as if to demonstrate that white women, as well as being insensitive racists, are bad actresses too.  Among the men, Danny Glover does his best in the thankless role of Albert, as does Willard Pugh as his son Harpo.  Albert’s father – ‘Old Mister’ – is played by Adolph Caesar, who died very shortly after the film was released.  In a smaller role, Laurence Fishburne is more or less wasted but magnetic nevertheless.

26 October 2013