Film

...Scenes and dialogue that develop major themes are dropped or abbreviated to be replaced by entertaining spectacle that is often irrelevant or just plain incoherent...

...The scene also represents an absurd conventionalization .of the more-or-less pantheistic religion that figures in the novel...

...In an act of sheer perversity, he omits or adulterates so much of what is most expressive and original in the novel and then realizes its weakest part with great fidelity...

...The cinematography and art direction conspire to produce an astound-ingly picturesque vision of poverty, quite at odds with Celie's life of drudgery and suffering...

...It is rare, to be sure, for a Hollywood movie to take on such strong and controversial material...

...In the movie, racism only touches the life of the pugnacious Sofia, and her best moment in the book—her confrontation with the daughter of her former white masters—is omitted entirely...

...But by deleting, diluting, and sanitizing—the movie is rated PG-13— Spielberg misses the chance to make a departure and gives us, instead, yet another entertainment for the whole family...

...The acting is generally quite strong— especially that of Whoopi Goldberg as Celie and Oprah Winfrey as Sofia...

...And the local farmhouse looks more like Scarlett O'Hara's Tara than > the rural dwellings captured on film by Walker Evans and the other Farm Security Administration photographers during the period covered here...

...The parallel editing here creates a mounting sense of tension, but the sequence makes no sense at all because there is no meaningful parallel between Celie's pain and desire for revenge and the traditional African rite...

...A jook-joint brawl brings some gratuitous action to the movie but serves no discernible narrative purpose...

...Material concerning the African antecedents of stultifying black male chauvinism is also missing, as is any clear indication that Celie and the blues singer Shug Avery become lesbian lovers...

...But one notable case of miscasting intrudes: Margaret Avery as the notorious Shug Avery both looks and talks more like a Wellesley graduate than a high-living, free-living jazz singer traveling the same circuit as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith...

...Spielberg also makes additions to Walker's work, and they tend to be either senseless, confusing, or opposite in meaning to hers...

...She also develops subsidiary themes of religious hypocrisy, lesbianism and female sexual independence, and colonial exploitation...

...it provokes admiration and sympathy for black characters and provides more juicy dramatic roles for black actors than any other big-budget Hollywood production in memory...

...Spielberg's movie is especially impoverished by his cleaning up of the book's language...

...The movie celebrates the vitality and fortitude of black women...

...One final disability: The melodramatic happy ending of The Color Purple, in which an unlikely concatenation of circumstances makes it possible for all its previously separated characters to be joyously reunited, stretches the credulity of the most confirmed optimists...

...Did the filmmakers fear that uncorrected black English would bring accusations of stereotyping down on their heads...

...Perhaps, then, it is more than mere coincidence that Spielberg chose to follow those hits with a film version of The Color Purple, Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of black experience...

...Alice Walker's work is a demonstration of the expressiveness and power of black English...

...FILM Michael H. Seitz Pop Purple Steven Spielberg's movies Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom led many critics to accuse him of racism—and also of infantilism and, mindless escapism...

...Whatever the case, its effect is to further undermine the credibility of a work which already had considerable problems in that area...

...Dear God, please see that Steven Spielberg never discovers Huckleberry Finn...

...Yet here it is that Spielberg faithfully renders the book...

...But the movie adulterates and sterilizes Walker's book to such a degree-black life in the rural South seen as 1940-ish MGM musical—that it is unlikely to win Spielberg any points for progressive antiracist filmmaking...

...In one of the most emotionally charged sequences, shots of Celie sharpening a razor with which she intends to cut her hateful husband's throat are intercut with shots of an African scarification rite, the whole thing scored with fearsome African drum music...

...Through her story, Walker reveals the violence and brutalization that come with racism and sexism...

...On almost every level, the production waters down the novel...

...The gospel music is wonderful, and the viewer can't help but be carried along by its uplifting energy, but the notion that this proudly unrepentant character would reconcile with the church—and, by implication, with a paternalistic God-is quite out of character...

...The movie has several filtered shots of characters walking through fields of flowers that could pass for out-takes from Elvira Madigan...

...And what is one to make of the rollicking gospel production number in which an apparently repentant Shug Avery leads the jook-joint crowd to church and tearfully embraces a heretofore disapproving minister...

...Walker's novel, raw and pungent for at least its first two-thirds, focuses on a black woman named Celie—on her dogged survival and the painful process by which she takes possession of her life...

...Were they worried that white middle-class viewers—for whom the movie is likely to have its greatest appeal—would have difficulty understanding the language without subtitles...

...Spielberg has been quoted as saying that "this was not a movie about race or racial issues," a comment most readers of the book will find amazing...

...By recasting the dialogue in something closer to standard English, the movie loses much in linguistic color and authenticity...

...Is this just one more aspect of an overall effort to homogenize the novel for mass consumption...

...When barely post-pubescent, Celie is made pregnant by her stepfather, has her two children taken from her, is given in marriage to a widower who beats her and treats her as his slave, is forcibly separated from her beloved sister, and endures a dreary, loveless existence as maidservant and fieldhand...

...The theme of colonial exploitation is dealt with in such a cursory manner that it is scarcely coherent...