I wrestled with whether or not I should finally see Steven Spielberg's 1985 adaptation of The Color Purple, the 1982 novel written by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker in the form of letters between Celie - a poor African-American girl in the early 1900s - and God, as it has remained one of the bigger holes in my attempts at completing Spielberg's filmography. Given Blitz Bazawule's new film was based on the 2005 theatrical production that turned Walker's work into a full-fledged musical though, I decided I'd write about this new film from that perspective, which is to say, one's first encounter with the material in any form. To this extent, Bazawule's film is both what I expected it to be given the context clues around the story while also being rather surprising in who its targets are and where its objectives lie. I will be interested to see how this latest adaptation differs from Spielberg's not only due to the fact it is sprinkled with musical numbers and is generally of a lighter tone than is maybe suitable for the material, but largely (mostly) for the perspective from which it is presented and told. There has of course been much discussion over the last few years as to whether Spielberg, a Jewish white male, was the right person to best depict the lives of African American women in rural Georgia during this time period to which the answer is obviously no, but with the introduction of Bazawule's vision into the fold the ways in which these iterations compare and contrast will certainly make for an interesting case study.
