'The Color Purple' in restrospect: twenty years after the debut, the film's beauty never fades

Black Issues Book Review, Nov-Dec, 2005 by Bernadette Adams Davis

TWENTY YEARS AGO, ON DECEMBER 18, 1985, WARNER BROS. released a movie directed by Steven Spielberg based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Alice Walker novel The Color Purple (Harvest Books [reprint], May 2003). Unlike the director's blockbuster adventure and science fiction films, this one featured a mostly black cast and focused on the story of a woman in the rural American South. It was the kind of story that rarely made it to the big or small screen.

When Walker's story of Celie, Nettie and Shug--already a best-selling novel--made it to theaters, it captured viewers and, sometimes, critics. The film sent more people to Walker's novels and poems and was a memorable cultural experience, prompting people to quote lines from Celie or Shug and reference the film's joy and heartbreak.

The play, which is scheduled to open on Broadway this winter, is not without its critics, who had similar problems with the film as with the novel. According to the most vocal naysayers, the language was insulting to blacks, it was immoral and detrimental to show black women loving each other, and there wasn't one redeeming black male character through the whole story. Still, the film was commercially successful, as were many who were involved with it, though not one of its eleven Academy Award nominations yielded an Oscar.

One element of the novel--though only briefly revealed in the film--that sparked heated dialogue and accusations was that Walker, Spielberg and anyone associated with the film did not have the community's interests at heart when representing the romantic relationship between Celie and Shug. Their brief movie kiss and relationship seems almost quaint in our current era of discussions of bisexuality and gay marriage. While same-sex relationships are still a very controversial subject in the larger and black community, the presence of lesbian or bisexual characters isn't as unexpected as it was in 1985.

Then there are the faces that were not so familiar then, that are artistic and entertainment royalty to us now. Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey have become some of our most famous and recognized performers. Seeing so many black faces featured in one film was still a rare jewel and often received as such.

What Spielberg gave us, from the gift Walker originally crafted, was a sweeping story of a black, southern woman. It was the epic, one of only a few, that we've long deserved as founding--though unrecognized, abused and brought by force--members of this nation. It presaged the increased attention society began to pay in the 1980s and '90s to issues of domestic violence, child sexual abuse and same-sex love. Walker writes that she was so hurt when Spielberg named Gone With the Wind as his favorite film.

According to Evelyn C. White's biography Alice Walker: A Life (W.W. Norton & Company, September 2004), Spielberg considered that "the greatest movie every made." That epic paean to a slave-era South had caused blacks so much pain that it was amazing that he could say such a thing. Still, he brought her novel to screen, giving blacks an epic about the descendants of the slaves who supported the opulent South that Scarlett mourns.

Among those descendants were Walker's family members, including her mother. Walker says she risked a lot by allowing Spielberg to make the film, "But I would have risked even more to wipe away the assault on my mother's dignity moviegoing had represented in the past."

The Color of Oppression

Although Walker had misgivings, as detailed in her book about the experience The Same River Twice (Pocket Books, January 1997), she eventually came "to treasure the movie as a mystically inspired and uniquely wrapped gift to her mother," as described in White's biography.

Walker gave readers and, finally, viewers a portrait of the South through "colored" eyes. Spielberg's film captures that vision on screen. The beauty of the region's flora, music and the extended family and community culture, as well as the horrors and challenges of agrarian life, Jim Crow-era racism and the oppression of black women and men.

This is a particularly important element of the film as a cultural document as the number of black farmers continues to dwindle and as our cultural production, including literature, film and music focuses almost exclusively on urban and suburban settings, themes and issues.

In her work, Walker does not limit her characters to traditional views of life just because they are in traditional, rural settings. In Shug and her philosophy about God and the universe, Walker gave us a model or a preview of the broader spirituality that many people have embraced in addition to and instead of a church-centric religious path. In her novel and the film, she introduces the idea of a spiritual rather than a religious approach to life, gently and without discounting or disparaging the history, beauty and power of the black church. The theme of redemption, particularly in Shug's attempt to return to her gospel roots, is also a way for Walker to give a positive nod to the black church, while sending her characters on a broader search for emotional and spiritual fulfillment.