Review: Musical Remake of 'The Color Purple' Deeper, Richer than the Original

When Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's novel "The Color Purple" premiered, it made a massive impression, with Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey each receiving Oscar nominations (as did co-star Margaret Avery) while the production got noms for everything from Best Picture to Best Cinematography... and did not take the gold for a single one of the 11 categories for which it was nominated.

It won't be a surprise if the Academy corrects that earlier oversight when Oscar time comes around again. The new musical film version of Walker's novel – written by Marcus Gardley, directed by Blitz Bazawule, and adapted from the novel as well as the stage musical (music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, with a book by Marsha Norman) – keeps the novel's structure, plot points, and characters, but makes something fresh and original out of the novel.

Battered and bartered by the men in her life, kind-hearted Celie (Fantasia Barrino) is raped by her father (Deon Cole) and then, when she gives birth to first one and then another baby, has those children snatched away. After she's more or less sold into a marriage with a "Mister" (Colman Domingo, doing a juicily vicious 180 from his standout work in "Rustin"), Celie is forbidden by her new husband to have anything to do with her beloved sister, Nettie (Ciara), whose iron will makes her a force to be reckoned with.

Unlike Sofia, Celie bends, willow-like, under the backhanded blows and callous emotional abuse of Mister; it's her survival mechanism and also an aspect of her gentle spirit. But when Mister's paramour, the singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) comes to town – and when her stepson Harpo (Corey Hawkins) takes the spitfire Sofia (Danielle Brooks) as his wife – Celie starts to see that other ways of dealing with abuse and exploitation are possible. Again and again, capable people – usually women – are uprooted, persecuted, and humiliated; but again and again sheer persistence, and what seems like the guiding hand of fate, allows new paths to open up before them. As one of the film's jubilant songs tells us, God works in mysterious ways.

Not all of the songs from the stage musical are included in the movie, and you could miss some of the development those songs lend to secondary characters, but it's hard to feel anything is lacking when Bazawule's direction – including some fantastical, big-movie moment musical numbers that channel everything from Busby Berkely to Bob Fosse – fill the screen. Notably, this new version puts the lesbian romance between Celie and Shug in the spotlight, with two of the most imaginative numbers showing how their mutual attraction grows.

Sprawling and yet disciplined, retaining the most memorable of the 1985 film's beats and yet coming up with plenty of its own ideas, this new take on "The Color Purple" finds pure pleasure in the bonds of family and friendship, even while refusing to shy away from the story's more brutal elements. Novels like the one this movie is based on are being banned by school boards and purged from libraries in red states, but storytelling this visceral and vital is impossible to erase.

"The Color Purple" opens in theaters Dec. 25.