The Color Purple (1985)
 Anyone
who believed Steven Spielberg was incapable of anything but
adventure sagas for the teenage consumer should have been
surprised by The Color Purple.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker, The
Color Purple was a noble, compelling, powerfully acted,
magnificently photographed, richly textured film of heartrending
impact that spans four decades in the lives of a black family in
the South and traces the heroic growth of one woman from the
chains of early-twentieth-century slavery to fully realised
independence. It is arguably still Spielberg's finest film.
It also marked the film debut of Whoopi Goldberg, former
Broadway comedienne and short-sketch artist, who demonstrated the
skill with which she can tackle the demands of a complex character
with sustaining force. As the centrepiece of this epic story, the
character of Celie is one of the screen's most unforgettable
heroines.
She first appears at the age of fourteen, in 1909 an unloved
child who has given birth to two babies by her own father, both
torn from her arms and given away to strangers. When her mother
dies, her father marries a girl Celie's age.
"Spoiled, ugly, but no stranger to hard work," Celie
is married off to a cruel widower called "Mister" (Danny
Glover). Abused as a surrogate mother for his own kids, a
workhorse, and a sexual object, Celie is forced through ignorance
and bigotry to surrender her own youth and accept adult
responsibilities before she's old enough to know anything about
life, a child-woman so imprisoned by her own servitude that a
rural mailbox on a road near the edge of a dusty cornfield becomes
her only link to the outside world. And even that is forbidden to
her.
From her lonely heart, Celie talks to God, then to her sister
Nettie, who has taught her to read and write. "I don't know
how to fight - I only know how to stay alive," says Celie.
The Color Purple is the valiant story of how she
survives, blossoms like the purple flowers that exude beauty even
in the ugliest environment of her childhood, and finds her own
inner strength and self-value.
Playing different ages as well as a thousand different moods
and emotions, Whoopi Goldberg was magnificent. From a dull-eyed
pacifist who takes her beatings the way most people take their
morning coffee, to a proud cane rod of a woman, brittle with age
but wise with inner spirit, she communicates her knowledge of how
injustice burns. She is three-dimensional, restrained, dignified,
and finally justifiably proud of the way her life turns out. It
was a mesmerizing performance.
Also buzzing around her like dazed butterflies were supporting
players of great depth and magnitude. By 1916, Mister brings home
a fancy woman named Shug Avery (beautifully acted by the gorgeous
actress/blues singer Margaret Avery), who becomes a source of
inspiration and eventual liberation to the other black women
around her.
By 1922, Celie's stepson Harpo (Willard Pugh) opens a back
roads juke joint and introduces to the family a combustible wife
named Sofia, played with robust force by Oprah Winfrey, the
popular Chicago talk-show hostess, who made a stunning acting
debut.
Sofia is a tough, rotund, zestful black lady who takes no
scrapes from any man, black or white. As the story progresses, her
own spirit and pride bring her to a sad downfall, and we see how
little control black women had over their own lives in the
changing South.
Rae Dawn Chong, as a younger-generation black girl sniffing the
winds of change, played Harpo's second wife. Adolph Caesar was
grand and plucky as Mister's dandy, bantam-rooster father, always
dispensing the wrong advice. Akosua Busia made a memorable
contribution as Celie's beloved, long-lost sister Nettie.
Seasons pass, relationships grow and change. Celie is always
the camera, recording everything as it passes across the
landscapes and reflects in the retinas of her eyes.
Black, dirt-poor, with no skills and no education, Celie
ultimately learns through the restorative power of love to stand
up and be counted. When she announces her declaration of
independence, it's a red-letter day in movies.
Images dance before the eyes: black children hop scotching
through a field of buttercups, a man playing a honky-tonk piano on
a river raft, a beautiful hussy belting the blues on Saturday
night, followed by the music of a Sunday morning
fire-and-brimstone gospel meeting.
The plantations and the ramshackle cabins, the general stores,
and first automobiles, the rocking chairs silhouetted against the
orange hot sunsets in the cotton fields - every image necessary to
transport the audience to Georgia in the infancy of this century
was artfully, rapturously recreated with beauty and awe.
Out of the pain and sadness, Spielberg and Goldberg awakened
Celie and her audience to renewed hope, and The Color Purple
became a life-affirming experience.
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