A Sense of Mystery and Wonder in a New “Color Purple”
The prime success of the new movie version of “The Color Purple” is its tone: it plays like legend, filtered through the pleasure and the pain of the telling. It’s a musical, adapted from Alice Walker’s novel and from Marsha Norman’s book for the stage play (which is also a musical and provides the new movie with most of its songs). The interjections and interminglings of the musical sequences in the drama endow the story with narrative distance along with its emotional immediacy; this distance from within seemingly conveys the very notion of adaptation, the feeling of tales retold, reimagined, relived. The movie’s director, Blitz Bazawule—making only his second feature, following his ultra-low-budget dramatic fantasy “The Burial of Kojo,” from 2018—catches the sense of mysteries and wond...