The Color Purple
Edgar Cochran ✝️

Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ Patron

The Color Purple 2023

★★½

Watched 09 Mar 2024

“Another classic remake?”, you might justifiably ask yourself, and just like Spielberg’s remake of Wise’s musical titan of 1961, this 140-minutes soporific effort opens in an impressionistic fashion with a fantastic cinematography featuring 1909’s Georgia Coast and the best song and choreography in the entire film: “Mysterious Ways”. Oscar nomination, you ask? Of course not. Imagine speaking openly about God as they do about races and genders; society hasn’t done that step yet. They prefer “I’m Just Ken” and all lame Ken puns.

From there, the entire weight is on the performances and production design, not the plot, screenplay or directing. Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson and Colman Domingo are out of the charts. The screenplay itself depends more on musical numbers, conflicts (epic family lunch clashes scene) and character introductions than the development of all the former. It is a shame, because films dealing with “big topics”, as they are called, often sin of this, and this is no exception. Brooks got an Oscar nomination for some bizarre reason I can’t really grasp (wait, it’s the Oscars, never mind), but Bazawule should probably retry in Ghana for more compelling cinematic statements.

The ending does not compensate the immense scope of the multigenerational race struggle at hand, nor the wait of the viewer for significant moments in this long, average epic, but it gets the job done.

54/100

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