The Color Purple review: A soaring and triumphant musical that tells a powerful story

Danielle Brooks steals show with outstanding performance in refreshingly modern and original take based on stage musicals

Phylicia Pearl as young Celie and Halle Bailey as young Nettie in The Color Purple. Photo: Warner Bros

The Color Purple has been a pop-culture touchstone ever since Alice Walker published the novel in 1982. After winning the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it was later adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg and nominated for eleven Academy Awards. In 2005, it was turned into a Broadway musical, which itself was revived in 2015.

Directed by Blitz Bazawule and written by Marcus Gardley, the latest incarnation of The Color Purple is based on these stage musicals. It mixes prominent actors in the shape of Taraji P Henson, Colman Domingo, Aunjane Ellis-Taylor, Louis Gossett Jr and Halle Bailey, with performers primarily from Broadway with singing backgrounds, such as Fantasia Barrino, Danielle Brooks, Phylicia Pearl Mpasis and Gabriella Wilson.

The result is an affecting and euphonious take on The Color Purple that is able to devastate viewers in one scene and then mesmerise their gaze and transport them emotionally through song and dance in the next. No wonder it has already been a mainstay during awards season, notching up dozens of nominations, with Brooks rightfully in contention for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award next month.

The Color Purple opens up in Georgia in 1909, where teenager Celie Harris (Barrino) and her sister Nettie (Bailey) live with their abusive father Alfonso (Deon Cole). After the death of their mother several years earlier, Alfonso rapes Celie, fathering two children with her, both of whom have been taken away.

Despite such hardships, Nettie’s positivity manages to keep Celie’s spirits high. The pair are forced apart, though, when Alfonso makes Celie marry local farmer Albert 'Mister' Johnson (Domingo), who already has three children of his own. Alfonso then bars Celie from having any contact with Nettie, who promises to write her sister every day.

Over the next decade, Celie has to put up with Alfonso’s abuse, all while being completely alienated from the outside world. But the appearance of local singer Shug Avery (Henson) and the fierce determination of her daughter-in-law Sofia (Brooks) begins to give Celie a confidence and strength that might just finally allow her to forge her own life.

While there’s no denying The Color Purple explores traumatic and uncomfortable subject matter, Bazawule’s direction is so vibrant and visually striking, and Gardley’s script ultimately so resilient and uplifting, that the film is not weighed down by these topics. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen shoots the film in such a heartfelt way that the pain and truth of the performances are ever-present, while the colour, energy and surrealism of the dance sequences never feel over the top or out of place.

Instead, because we have seen the characters endure so much, The Color Purple is all the more powerful. Its toe-tapping songs and gloriously choreographed dance sequences are able to make you feel their emotions and understand their plights.

The Color Purple is helped in these pursuits by the fine performances of its entire ensemble of actors. Brooks most definitely steals the show as the defiant Sofia, but Barrino deserves huge acclaim for the manner in which she carries the film through its trials and tribulations without ever making it feel mawkish.

Henson and Domingo are both exemplary in their turns, too, elevating the more inexperienced performers, while not overly dominating scenes, and also then seamlessly making their characters more complex as the story requires.

The Color Purple might sag in places because of its two-hour-and-21-minute-long running time, but its final act and its concluding scene are so crowd-pleasing that you still leave the film soaring and feeling triumphant. It is a worthy addition and companion piece to the previous beloved versions, as well as a refreshingly modern and original take that will allow younger audiences to fully appreciate how important and vital the story is.