Spielberg: The Color Purple

ACT I (0:00-28:30): This act could be called “Celie’s Family Torn Asunder.” Celie’s child is taken from her (and we hear of an earlier child who was similarly taken), she is traded by her father to a local farmer, who beats her mercilessly and treats her like dirt. Her sister Nettie runs away from home, away from her and Celie’s father, to be with her. The farmer, “Mister,” sets his eyes on Nettie, but when he attacks her she retaliates, and he drives her from the house. She leaves, reluctantly, promising that nothing but death can keep her and Celie apart.

ACT II (28:30-45:30): Many years pass. Celie grows from girl to woman. Mister’s son Harpo brings home a woman named Sophia. Sophia stands in contrast to both Celie and Nettie. She’s bossy, proud, short-tempered and unbendable. Celie, seeing an opportunity to get back at her tormentors, sparks a conflict between Sophia and Harpo. Her plan backfires and Sophia leaves Mister’s farm.

ACT III (45:30-1:24:00) Shug Avery, a colorful blues singer and an old flame of Mister’s, comes to stay on Mister’s farm. Shug, like Sophia, also stands in contrast to Celie. She is both weaker, in that she is drawn to men’s power, but also stronger, as she seems to move independently of them and has learned to use them to her advantage. Both Mister and Celie are obsessed with Shug. Shug initially calls Celie ugly and laughs in her face, but as she gets better (it’s not explained why she’s ill, but some sort of substance abuse seems likely) and gets back into singing (at Harpo’s backwoods juke-joint) she warms to Celie, writes and sings a song for her and even makes love to her. Shug then tries to enter the local church, but is rebuffed by the minister. She leaves Mister’s farm. Celie tries to go with her but loses her nerve. This is Celie’s low-point.

ACT IV (1:24:00-2:07:00) Sophiamouths off to the wrong person and ends up pistol-whipped, jailed and turned into a servant to a white man’s idiot wife, Miss Millie. Shug returns, now married to a grinning showboater, Grady. Mister and Grady bond over their mutual lust for Shug while Shug goes to the mailbox and discovers a letter to Celie from her long-lost sister Nettie. While Mister is off drinking, Shug and Celie discover a whole cache of letters from Nettie, where she outlines her life as a missionary in Africa and tells Celie that her children are alive and well and living as Africans. Now that Celie knows that she has a family elsewhere, she leaves Mister and goes with Shug to Memphis. Sophia leaves Miss Millie and returns to her home.

ACT V (2:07:00-2:30:00) An act of forgiveness and reconciliation. In Celie’s absence, Mister’s farm devolves into chaos as he staggers around in an alcohol-induced haze. Celie’s father dies, whereupon she learns that her father was actually her step-father and her real father has left her the family house. Now an empowered, independent landowner, Celie opens a pants-making business and prospers. Shug returns and takes up singing at Harpo’s again, but then repents and leads a crowd of sinners to the local church, where we learn that the minister is also Shug’s father. Meanwhile, Mister, having bottomed out, turns over a new leaf and secretly helps Nettie return to the US. Celie is reunited with her sister and her children.

NOTES: Spielberg, obviously chafing at the limitations of genre, steps way outside his comfort zone with this, his most complex narrative yet. The Color Purple has a protagonist who is frustrated in her desires and incapable of action until well past the two-hour mark. When her want is rewarded it is without her direct action. There is something Dickensian about the narrative, a life-spanning story of the poor and helpless suffering at the hands of brutal oppressors. But there is also something Capra-esque about it; Celie reminds me a lot of George Bailey, who longs to get out of his small town but is tied there by family obligations. George wants to get away in spite of his family, Celie wants to get away to find her family, both are stuck, both are incapable of action, and both are rewarded in the end in spite of their inability to leave town.

There is also something Capra-esque about Spielberg’s direction. As with It’s a Wonderful Life, The Color Purple is a story of extreme sadness and frustrated desire, yet the direction of each emphasizes the warmth and comedy of the narrative instead of the bleakness and despair. The performances in The Color Purple are sometimes startlingly broad — some of the scenes would absolutely not look out of place in 1941. Spielberg’s typically fluid, seamless direction doesn’t feel like it matches the material and leads to hyperbole and cartoonishness. Everything is overdone — Harpo isn’t just a poor carpenter, he’s a bumbling oaf who repeatedly falls through rooftops. His juke-joint doesn’t merely leak in the rain, it becomes a veritable indoor shower. Miss Millie isn’t merely a poor driver, she’s a caricature of a hysterical, swerving madwoman. Mister’s farm doesn’t just fall into ruin, he ends up with goats in the kitchen and shutters falling off the windows on cue. Shug doesn’t merely refuse a poorly-cooked breakfast, she hurls it across the hallway so that it leaves primary-colored splatters on the wall.

When the scenes don’t move as broad comedy they move as suspense — there are several sequences that would fit comfortably into Hitchcock. What the scenes do not work as is moments of genuine human interaction, which feels like a loss to me — the action feels like it’s all choreographed for the camera instead of the camera happening to witness moments of spontaneous behavior. Which is to say, I feel like Spielberg took a bold step forward by choosing this very non-genre narrative to shoot, but then shot it as though it were a genre piece anyway, relying on his sense of rhythm and his ability to manufacture suspense and emotional involvement to propel his largely plotless story forward.

Spielberg softens the brutality of the narrative in other ways as well. The antagonists of The Color Purple are all foolish, stumbling blowhards. Mister is a threat to Celie, but we never feel like he’s a threat to us — we can see he’s a petty tyrant easily bested. Likewise, Mister’s father is a muttering old codger and Miss Millie is a squealing, bug-eyed idiot. This helps us forgive them and aids Act V’s motions of reconciliation (which are not in the book), but it robs the story of drama. How effective an antagonist would Mr. Potter be in It’s a Wonderful Life if, at the end of the movie, it turned out that he was the one who brought Harry Bailey home and donated the money to get George out of debt?

The more I think of it, I’m not at all sure what to make of Act V of The Color Purple. Mister redeems himself, but does not announce it. Celie finds out that the man who raped her as a child was not her father but her stepfather, and Shug Avery begs for forgiveness from her own estranged father. After two hours of telling us about the horrors visited upon women by men, it’s like the story, in the end, pulls its punch — Mister isn’t so bad after all, Celie’s father is not only innocent but a benefactor, and Shug is all too desperate for the approval not only of her father but of the patriarchal church he represents. None of this is motivated by plot — it just sort of happens out of the blue. Celie even seems baffled herself: she accepts her father’s house but tells the previous owner she still doesn’t understand how she got it. The previous owner’s explanation doesn’t help very much.

It’s well known that The Color Purple is the only Spielberg movie that is not scored by John Williams, and yet I’d be hard-pressed to tell you how what Quincy Jones does here is very different from what Williams would have done. There is a lot of musical heartstring-tugging, and a good deal of Mickey-Mousing as well. Which is a shame, because there is a little shadow-movie within The Color Purple that is related to O Brother, Where Art Thou, a movie about the history of southern black American music that could have been fascinating. (The Color Purple is now, of course, a musical, so I suppose it’s not too late.)