Cinema
A colourful film
Peter Ackroyd
Purple flowers; purple music; purple passages. And this in the first few minutes — rarely can a film so soon have lived up to its title. Almost before the credits have unrolled, incest, childbirth, and innocent merriment in the fields have been daubed across the screen, we all sit back with our handkerchiefs poised and ready for lift-off.
The Color Purple is concerned with simple country folk and in particular with Celie, a young black girl who is portrayed as Georgie's answer to Oliver Twist. The film is very much in the epic rural tradition, in which Nature is viewed as a scene of unparalleled suffering. Celie herself is raped by her stepfather, torn from her children, beaten by her husband, uprooted from her family, mocked by her step-
children, and then forced to cook for her husband's girlfriend. It is not altogether a happy story, in other words, but in the cinematic tradition the human agony is matched only by an interest in the grandly picturesque. This is a Spielberg film, as well, and the flat early-20th-century land- scape (the narrative moves slowly from 1909 to 1937) is perfectly suited for his visual bravura just as the domestic horrors are an appropriate target for his unerring sentimentality. There is not a heart-string which he does not know how to pluck, stretch, pull and, if necessary, break.
In fact The Color Purple is essentially a collection of moods, of a suitably basic kind, which are then furnished with the appropriate visual images — in this latter capacity, of course, Spielberg is not easily surpassed. He has a genius for film in its most primitive form. None of its 'develop- ments' over the past 50 years have really affected him: he would have been just as at home, and just as powerfully effective, in the silent cinema.
Of course this means that he has very little to do with the more 'literary' aspects of film-making (for that matter, he hasn't much to do with literacy) — so the original novel from which this particular produc- tion has been taken, Alice Walker's book of the same name, must have been changed out of all recognition. Apparently the original narrative was concerned at least in part with the twin themes of feminism and lesbianism. But these aspects only touch the film without really shaping it — and in any case sexual politics are here trans- formed into something much easier to recognise and to assimilate. Sex becomes one aspect of the general 'fairy tale' quality with which Spielberg seems always to invest his films; this is a story of ogres and princesses rather than men and women. The former are brutal and unfeeling, while the latter are warm and sympathetic: that is as far is it goes.
Without any real activity in this area, however, real drama is difficult to find and so Celie remains throughout a care- worn, subdued and generally put-upon little waif until a miraculous transforma- tion scene occurs towards the end. If it were not for the presence of Whoopi Goldberg in this role (there is no Saint Whoopi, at least in the Catholic calendar, so presumably this is a stage name?), with her remarkable face and even more remarkable manner, little Celie would be unbearable.
This is a 'black' film in the sense that it is performed almost exclusively by blacks, but it has been produced and directed by a white man. The difference this might be presumed to make is small, but neverthe- less it is tangible. Even despite Spielberg's notorious appetite for romance, the film has been rendered slightly unreal, slightly exaggerated — an effect best represented by the fact that Whoopi Goldberg was previously best known as a comedian. This is nothing against her talent as an actor which is considerable — but there seems to be a sense in which both black actors and white director have not forgotten the old `darkie' routines of vaudeville. All the roles are somewhat overplayed as a result, and the popular cinema still seems able to deal with black Americans only as happy- go-lucky types with splitting grins or as outcasts characteristically, if not always, in tears. As a result, The Color Purple is like a combination of Roots, Oliver and The Sound of Music.
This is not to say that it is not a success as a film, of course, since it is undeniably effective in its own terms. The handker- chiefs achieve lift-off, and the audience is pervaded by that communal spirit which was last generally experienced at public hangings. The Color Purple is, as they say in the newspapers, 'a good night out.'
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