Spielberg’s first film without spaceships or whips is handsomely built and, in Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, superbly acted. It is also soft where the book is hard, and it keeps cutting to slapstick whenever the pain gets close. Worth an evening, with reservations.
Alice Walker’s novel is told in letters, most of them addressed to God by a girl nobody else will listen to, and it is blunt about incest, rape, beatings and the love between two women that finally lets one of them stand up. Steven Spielberg, in 1985 the most successful maker of adventure films alive, took it on as his first grown-up drama. What he made is 154 minutes of care, golden light and real feeling, and we came out of it convinced he had understood about two thirds of the book he was adapting.
The third he understood is Celie. Whoopi Goldberg, in her first film role, plays her for most of the running time with her shoulders folded in and her hand across her mouth, a woman who has been told she is ugly so often that she hides her own smile. She barely speaks in the first hour. Her face does the talking, and Spielberg, to his credit, lets it. When Celie starts to answer back, late on and in ways we will not describe, the effect is of a house that has had its windows painted shut for thirty years being opened all at once.
Oprah Winfrey is the other reason to watch. Her Sofia arrives to marry Harpo (Willard E. Pugh), Albert’s son, and she walks into that yard like she owns it and everyone in it. Winfrey plays her big, loud and completely without fear, and the film is at its sharpest when it lets us see what the world does to a Black woman who refuses to lower her eyes. Danny Glover’s Albert is a brute, but Glover gives him a lazy vanity and a fear of his own father (Adolph Caesar, wonderfully mean) that make him a man rather than a monster. Margaret Avery’s Shug is warm and sly and a little tired, and when she sings a song to Celie in Harpo’s juke joint, everyone present and the film itself go still.
That moment got to us. So did an early one: Nettie hauled to the gate by Albert while Celie runs after her, the two girls’ hands pressed together through the slats before they are pulled apart. Allen Daviau shoots the farm in late-afternoon light so thick you could spread it on bread, and here it earns its keep, because the beauty makes the cruelty worse. J. Michael Riva’s house is a real place, unpainted wood, a porch that sags, a kitchen full of the labour of one exhausted woman. Aggie Guerard Rodgers dresses Celie in shapeless grey and Shug in red satin and feathers, and the film’s whole argument about who is allowed to be looked at is in those two wardrobes.
The trouble is what Spielberg does when the material frightens him. Every time the story goes somewhere dark he reaches for a gag: Harpo falls through a roof, and then falls through it again. Michael Kahn cuts these bits fast and bright, as if for a different film, and each one lets the air out of the scene before it. Quincy Jones’s score is worse. It swells under everything, strings and choir and harmonica, telling us to weep at moments when Goldberg’s face had already made the case. There is a stretch set in Africa, following Nettie, that is shot like a travelogue and lands like one. And Menno Meyjes’s screenplay reduces what happens between Celie and Shug to a single kiss and a lot of meaningful glances, which is not what Walker wrote and not enough to explain the change in Celie that the last act depends on.
We were moved, often, and we were also aware of being worked on, and by the second hour the two feelings were fighting. Most critics have come down on one side or the other; the reviews split almost evenly between people who find it dignified and people who find it saccharine. It is both. The acting is honest and the direction keeps apologising for the story.
It was released in British cinemas on 11 July 1986 with a 15 certificate. See it for Goldberg, for Winfrey, and for the light on the fields. Then read the book, which is shorter, harder and does not have a harmonica in it.
