Film

Rip It Up, Issue 107, 1 June 1986, Page 8

Film

THE COLOUR PURPLE Director: Steven Spielberg Alice Walker’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel seems a strange choice for the man who gave the world Indiana Jones and ET. The book relates the struggle of a group of black women to assert themselves in a small Georgia environment between 1909 and 1940 — its chief virtue, a tremendous clarity and singlemindedness in relating this theme; its chief failing, a tendency towards the folksy. In the screen version, the hard edge of Walker’s novel has been considerably blunted, most irritatingly by the sumptuously kitsch photography of Allen Daviau and the jarringly inappropriate score by Quincy Jones (one of the film’s co-producers). Clearly, a simpler approach would have been better and one might even dare to suggest that Spielberg would have made a better translation of the novel back in his television days. Even so, one is almost forced to admire the adroit manner in which the director marshalls the energy of its production: apart from a few longeurs, it carries the weight of its 152 minutes running time fairly well. Stylistically, it works best when Spielberg relinquishes any attempts to be overly “arty’’. Sometimes the montage effects work beautifully — the set up for Sofia instigating the Jook Joint brawl is one instance, but too often, as in the cross-cutting between So-

~ fia’'s remonstrating with Celie and Harpo’s explanations of the source of his black eye, it seems . overly contrived. The humour is also some‘times crudely drawn, reminding one of Spielberg’s miscalculated 194 1. How else could one explain the extended sequence in which Miss Milly (one of the few, and invariably lampooned white characters in the film) drives her car berserkly around the town. Carrying over from the original novel, there is also a disturbing imbalance between the female and male characters: Walk--er obviously has little sympathy for the latter. Danny Glover’s Mister is (apart from his final change of heart) a seemingly irredeemable villain and Willard Pugh’s Harpo seems little better “than a village idiot, his falling

through roofs becoming something of a running, or should one say, falling joke. But then, accomplished as the playing might be, the women also register as strangely onedimensional. Whoopi Goldberg, as the put-upon Celie, cowers for most of the film. Oprah Winfey’s Sofia alternates between the hearty and the comatose whilst Akosua Busia’s Nettie glows with a never-ending supply of positivism. Margaret Avery, playing the visiting blues singer, Shug Avery, lends a little astringency to the film with her acerbic wit and style, although the scene in which she rediscovers religion and leads the singing crowd from Jook Joint to church is as silly as anything MGM could have dreamed up in its heyday.