#24 — The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985)
When I decided I was going to continue on with the Top 50 Films posts, addressing a new decade every year, I knew some extra homework would be required. Unsurprisingly, the further back in time I went, the vaster the gaps in my personal viewing history. There were (and are) multiple films that are considered canonical that I haven’t seen at all, or at least have never seen properly, watched with the correct aspect ratio from start to finish. But there were also films that I’d seen, even multiple times, that I felt the need to watch again, trying to separate them somewhat from my emotional memories and consider them freshly as works of cinema. For the eighties, the film that fit most clearly in that category was Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple.

When it was released during Oscar season of 1985, this adaptation of Alice’s Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 1982 was widely viewed as Spielberg’s attempt to make a real “grown up” movie. He’d followed industry-redefining commercial achievement in the nineteen-seventies with even more phenomenal box office hits like Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, but there was a certain population of cineastes who were happy to dismiss Spielberg’s efforts as frivolous, in part because of the focus on space aliens or spirited derring-do. Spielberg was a grand success by most Hollywood measures and, at the time, one of the few directors who could sell a movie on his name alone. Even though his films were generally embraced by the critical community as well, there was a level of broader respect that he seemed to crave, and his detractors were quick to dismiss The Color Purple as a crass attempt to achieve that through trading in his sense of childhood wonder for another creator’s grimmer sensibility. I spent so many of the intervening years since I’d first seen the film in full exposure to the barrage of convincing complaints about it that I began to doubt my relatively youthful appreciation of The Color Purple.

Set in the first years of the 20th century in the American South, the film tells the story of Celie, a young black women living in abused misery, first at the hands of her terrible father and then the man she’s essentially sold off to as a wife. Played with imposing authority by Danny Glover, the husband is referred to only as Mister, and he treats Celie like a piece of property, exacting hard, arbitrary justice for any perceived infractions against his authority. Celie struggles to find any pathways out of her trouble existence and further watches as those around her as battered by a unforgiving society. For most of the film’s running time, Celie is played by Whoopi Goldberg in a tender, heartrending, emotionally open performance that is all the more astonishing given that she never again even approached anything of this level of complexity and subtlety. She is charged with playing an entire, ever-evolving life. The effectiveness of the film is reliant on Goldberg taking Celie from strictly controlled meekness through levels of gradually building strength until she lands at a point of believable contentment at the end. The delicacy she brings to her work her is simply amazing.

Spielberg was commonly knocked for his own reticence in the development of the film’s story. Celie’s abuse at the hands of men and her sexually awakening with a loving woman are equally shied away from. These elements are clear, but not pressed in on, often not even depicted directly. The real question is whether or not the tendency of Spielberg to turn his camera away at the point of impact undercuts the power of the story. Usually, this is exactly the sort of undue reluctance that I would rail against in a film, probably even dragging the accusatory word “cowardice” into the argument. And yet, I feel the complaint doesn’t truly apply here. Spielberg is building the film in a way that relies on classic Hollywood narrative storytelling techniques rather than explicitness, which, let’s face it, would probably be easier. Spielberg takes the screenplay by Menno Meyjes and develops an unerring emotional trajectory for the story. Broken down to its individual parts, the film may occasionally seem manipulative, but it’s truthfully no more so deserving of this criticism than just about any other act of moviemaking that doesn’t rigidly adhere to the tenets of cinéma vérité. It’s just that Spielberg, at his best, knows how to tap into the emotions of the audience better than just about anyone who ever earned their paycheck by calling out “action” and “cut.”

Following the plot of Walker’s original novel requires an improvement for Celie’s fortunes that doesn’t totally jibe with the unrelenting bleakness of her circumstances, and Spielberg needs to find a way to make that work. In some ways, it’s his initial gentleness that makes the hopefulness that creeps in later feel like a suitable extension of the film’s worldview. He engenders a monumental emotional pull to the story through his commitment to the merging of his vision with that of Walker’s and indeed all of his collaborators. The film develops the totality of Celie’s life and where it’s lived with an incredible, enviable thoroughness, which is far more important for the strength of the film than prying more deeply into a bedroom scene.

There were those who felt Spielberg shouldn’t have even considered making this film, positing that it was too far from his personal life experience for him to bring anything valuable to the process. In my estimation, that very factor caused him to approach the story with more care and an enhanced ability to make sure that his empathy didn’t preclude thinking about the material critically. As would be the case with Schindler’s List several years later, he was scared enough of the project to push himself harder to get it right. In that respect, Spielberg wasn’t only a perfectly suitable choice to direct film, but actually an ideal one. The Color Purple is a great film, and it’s great because of his efforts.