Supposedly Fun

Since it was published in 1982, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has taken the world by storm. It won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was, rightly I think, recognized as an American literary classic right from the start (although my feelings on Alice Walker herself are complicated–look at my deep dive on the novel for more on that, but the short version is that she has unfortunately used her platform to advance antisemitic and transphobic conspiracy theories in recent years–problems that are, thankfully, not found in The Color Purple itself). Anyway, given the success, it’s not surprising that Hollywood came calling almost immediately.

All told, The Color Purple has been adapted for film, then for Broadway, then revived on Broadway, and then the Broadway adaptation was itself brought to movie theaters in 2023. We are not really going to talk about the Broadway adaptation. For one thing, I’ve never seen it. For another, I think focusing on the changes from the book to the two film adaptations will give us plenty to discuss without making this unbearably long.

The Color Purple is particularly interesting because this feels like an instance where the success of a book over time is at least partially due to shared cultural respect for a film adaptation. The biggest examples of this are, of course, To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone With the Wind (although I do not like the latter at all).

Be warned: there will be spoilers because we will be talking about the plot of The Color Purple in detail. If you want to experience the book or at least one of the movies first, that’s fine–just save this until you’re ready to come back.

What Is The Color Purple About?

You can skip this part if you like, but some of these details will be important when we begin discussing the differences between the novel and the film adaptations. To avoid confusion, these details are how the story plays out in the novel.

The Color Purple follows the life of Celie, a black woman in Georgia who endures many abuses and separations across decades in the early part of the 20th century. In the first half of the novel, Celie is writing letters to God in which she relates how she was raped and abused by her father, resulting in two children that he took from her. At first, she does not know if he killed the children or gave them away, but when Celie recognizes one of her babies with a woman in town, she knows that her children are alive. The absence of her children weighs on Celie throughout her life. We later learn that this man is not, in fact, her father, but the trauma of incest and assault still linger.

The only bright spot in Celie’s life is her sister Nettie. Nettie encourages Celie to fight back, but Celie is already so beaten down that she can only focus on surviving, not fighting. Nettie also teaches Celie to read and write.

Celie’s father marries her off to an abusive widower known as Mister, who needs someone to raise his children and clean his house. Mister’s children, including his son Harpo, are mean and unwelcoming to Celie. Nettie briefly comes to live with them in order to escape her father, who has set his sights on her now that Celie is no longer around to protect her from him. But the joy of having Nettie around is short-lived because Mister also has his eyes on her, and when she refuses his advances, he forces her to leave. Celie tells Nettie to go to the home of the woman she saw in town with Celie’s baby (without telling Nettie why).

For a while, Celie remains an insecure, desperately unhappy woman who quietly goes about the business of life without actually living. Things begin to change when Shug Avery, a jazz singer Mister has been infatuated with for years, comes to stay with them to recover from a serious illness that remains unnamed, although townspeople are quick to blame it on her “life of sin.” Although initially hurt when the first thing Shug does is call her ugly, both Shug and Celie eventually form a strong friendship. Shug even delays her departure to go back on tour when Celie reveals that Mister beats her when Shug isn’t around–so that Shug can be sure that Celie will be safe until she returns. Ultimately, this forms a romantic triangle. Celie and Mister are both in love with Shug, and Shug engages in romantic relations with both of them separately–although over time, her affection for Celie grows and her affection for Mister diminishes.

In a subplot, the now-adult Harpo falls in love with a strong-willed woman named Sofia, who has become pregnant with their child. Mister disapproves, but Harpo marries Sofia anyway. The problem is that the second they are married, Harpo expects Sofia to be an obedient wife. Mister advises Harpo to beat her until she minds her husband, but Harpo is reluctant until Celie agrees. When he tries, however, Sofia beats him right back and confronts Celie about her betrayal–leaving Celie ashamed. Unable to have peace in her own home, Sofia takes her children and leaves Harpo.

Later on, Sofia is sent to prison for years after getting into a fight with the white mayor and the white mayor’s wife, who patronizingly invited Sofia to be her maid after seeing how clean Sofia’s children were. The cruelest irony is that when released from actual prison, Sofia spends more years in a situation that might as well be prison: working as the maid of the mayor’s wife and separated from her family. Although beaten down, Sofia recovers her strength over the course of the novel and reunites with Harpo, who no longer tries to make her obey him.

Meanwhile, Celie and Shug discover that Mister has been hiding letters from Nettie. And so, in the second half of the book, Celie’s letters pivot away from God to be addressed to a more literal recipient: Nettie. We also catch up to Nettie’s story through the letters Mister had been hiding (and later with newer updates). She did find the woman Celie saw in town, who turned out to be a missionary along with her husband. Nettie recognized Celie’s children, so she stayed with the family as they traveled to Africa to work as missionaries. Nettie’s letters from Africa relate the continuing damages of colonialism occurring in Africa. When the adoptive mother of Celie’s children dies of disease after a few years, Nettie ends up marrying their adoptive father and planning a return to Georgia.

Celie’s relationship with Shug and the promise of a reunion with Nettie inspire Celie to take charge of her destiny. She grows in confidence, leaving Mister to make her own path in life. She starts a business sewing pants for women, which is a scandalous idea at the time, and learns to stand on her own two feet. Her relationship with Shug ends on a somewhat ambiguous note (Shug returns to her after another relationship ends, but will it last?), but Celie has found her strength, so she’ll be okay regardless. She even forms a respectful friendship with Mister, who learns to see her as a human after she leaves him.

But best of all, at the close of the novel Celie and Nettie finally reunite, and Nettie brings Celie’s now-grown children back to her (along with her grandchildren).

A Brief History of The Color Purple Adaptations

The first film adaptation was released in 1985, three years after the book was published. It was a box office success and, although there was some controversy about Steven Spielberg being a white director helming a film about black characters and history, it was mostly a critical success as well. Roger Ebert called it the best film of the year. Others, like Janet Maslin of The New York Times, were less convinced that Spielberg had been an appropriate match for such dark source material. Ultimately, despite its successes, controversy, including protests from the NAACP over both the book and the film’s representation of black men, ultimately damaged its awards prospects. The Color Purple was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and did not win any of them, tying 1977’s The Turning Point for the record of most nominations without a single win. We won’t really be getting into the controversy here–there just isn’t time. You can check out the film’s Wikipedia page for a quick overview if you would like.

Over the next twenty years, both the book and the original film showed strong staying power in American pop culture. That led to a 2005 musical adaptation for Broadway, financed in part by one of the stars of the 1985 film who had gone on to wild success in her broadcasting career: Oprah Winfrey (you may have heard of her). But though the musical was a success, critics weren’t wild about the adaptation. It was nominated for ten Tony Awards and only won a single one for LaChanze, who played the leading role of Celie.

Despite mixed critical response, the musical was successful enough that it maintained a steady touring schedule even after it closed on Broadway. Most significantly, the first international production in London, staged in 2013, cast Cynthia Erivo as Celie. The show was brought back to Broadway with Cynthia Erivo two years later in a revival that was an enormous critical success, winning Tony Awards for Erivo and for Best Revival of a Musical.

That success is probably how we got to the second film adaptation, which takes the musical and brings it to the screen. A lot of people expected the new film adaptation to be a vehicle for Cynthia Erivo, who parlayed her Broadway success to two Oscar nominations for the film Harriet (as an actress but also for co-writing an original song). In the end, Erivo decided to sign on for the film adaptation of a different musical instead: Wicked. Fantasia Barrino, who won season 3 of American Idol and replaced LaChanze on Broadway during the show’s original run, ended up getting the part of Celie instead.

Because the new movie hasn’t even been in theaters a month at the time I am filming this, we don’t know what legacy this new version will have. Only time will tell. But we can compare it to both the 1985 adaptation and the original novel.

How to Make Brutal Subject Matter Palatable

Make no mistake: the things that happen in The Color Purple are brutal. The things that happen to Celie, Sophia, and others are difficult to read about and difficult to watch. So there’s a unique challenge here: how to portray the abuses, assaults, and racist incidents without making it unbearable to an audience.

The epistolary form of the novel goes a long way toward helping keep the book palatable. Each chapter is a short letter that is roughly 2-3 pages long, meaning that details are fed to the reader in short bursts. There’s no prolonged agony.

Film is, obviously, quite different. Scenes work differently from chapters. How much do you show, and how do you frame the action so an audience doesn’t feel brutalized?

The 1985 film leans into a comedic sensibility that keeps a certain buoyancy for the viewer. It helps a great deal that the cast has great comedic timing and dramatic chops. Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Celie, was literally a comedian before she was cast in The Color Purple, which means that she’s exceptionally good at finding humorous moments to balance out the heavier scenes. Oprah Winfrey can make you laugh by exaggerating Sofia’s walk so it looks like a military march, but she can also break your heart when she confronts Celie about telling Harpo to beat her. And Danny Glover can quickly go from making Mister terrifying to making him seem ridiculous as he pratfalls while deciding what to wear to see Shug Avery. You can tolerate the heavy stuff because you are also being amused.

The 2023 adaptation also has a comedic sensibility–and is helped by the fact that a musical by its very nature has a certain buoyancy. But it also shies away from showing the heavier, darker, and more violent aspects of the story. We know that it’s taking place, but we don’t see it. It implies without showing. If I had to choose, I would say this is the weakest approach because it compromises the story. For instance, it does appear that the Broadway musical had a whole song about how mean Mister is called “Big Dog.” There’s another song where Mister threatens to kill Celie if she ever goes near the mailbox. Neither are included in the movie, which feels like an odd choice–especially when they do include a big choreographed number for Harpo called “Workin’,” which doesn’t really do anything to advance the plot. And it’s a song that isn’t even on the Broadway soundtracks. As a result, the 2023 movie feels incredibly skittish about violent or unsettling content, which does harm the story.

What the 1985 and 2023 Films Have In Common

The 2023 Color Purple contains DNA from the 1985 film, choosing to include several of the original adaptation’s departures from Alice Walker’s book. More than anything, that really just goes to show how the 1985 movie is just as canon as the book itself at this point. People have loved the movie so much that it feels like audiences expect to see callbacks to it–even when those callbacks don’t trace back to Walker’s text. This is best illustrated by the 2023 movie incorporating “Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister),” which was an original song Shug sings in the 1985 movie (and which wasn’t in the Broadway show). Here are more similarities:

Mail Delivery

Building off of what we just talked about at the end of the last section, the book doesn’t try to explain why Celie never checked the mail–or why Mister was able to successfully hide Nettie’s letters from her for so long. But both movies have scenes where Mister threatens Celie if she ever goes near the mailbox. It’s just a way of explaining why Celie had a barrier to getting Nettie’s letters.

Shug’s Father

The most significant departure from the book that both movies share is the idea that Shug Avery’s father is the local preacher, following an arc in which Shug’s pious father disapproves of her until they ultimately reach a reconciliation through song (yes, even in the non-musical). In the book, Shug’s family is elsewhere–she mentions visiting family in Arizona at one point, but they are never seen or remarked on beyond the fact that they disapprove of her lifestyle. It’s assumed that Shug met Mister while traveling as a singer–not because she grew up in town.

This feels like a concession the original film made because Shug’s family situation and the ways society at large disapprove of her being a woman with agency and a sexual appetite are things a novel can get at without having them directly in the plot. They’re a bit diaphanous without a narrative feeding you the cues. Creating a plotline where a religious leader literally disapproves of Shug, and having that religious leader be her father, brings it home in the showier way the medium of film demands. But the way these scenarios play out in both movies is different.

The 1985 movie shows that Shug is drawn to the local church, but she remains distant until a song battle of sorts breaks out: Shug is performing at Harpo’s juke joint when the choir from the church begins to drown her out, so she leads a group of people back to the church belting out the choir’s song to beat them at their own game. When she does, the preacher embraces her and reveals that he is her father, who has come to understand that his daughter has her own relationship with her religion. In the 2023 movie, the relationship is explicitly laid out early on and the song battle is scuttled in favor of a quieter moment where Shug quietly sneaks into the church while her father is playing the piano and singing a hymn. She joins him at the piano and the two sing together. By the end of the song, her father gives her a hug–signaling that he has also come to accept her. The quiet emotion of the 2023 movie is tender and beautiful, but I confess I missed the bigness of the 1985 scenario.

Shug’s Protection (or Lack Thereof)

One change that both movies made that I find inexplicable is that in the book, when Celie tells Shug that she doesn’t want her to leave because Mister beats her less when she’s around, Shug immediately begins to protect Celie. She agrees to stay until she can talk to Mister and be sure that Celie will be okay if she’s gone. This is also the moment Shug slowly begins to become disillusioned in Mister–to see that the man she initially fell for is not the man she currently knows. Of course, it should have been obvious that Mister was awful to Celie, but Shug didn’t see it until it was verbalized to her.

Both movies have the moment where Celie admits to being beaten by Mister, but oddly neither one has Shug do much of anything about it. It’s a weird omission to me.

Celie’s Children

In the book, when Celie and Nettie are separated by Mister, Celie tells Nettie to go to the home of the woman she saw in town with her baby. For one thing, she’s obsessed with this family because they have her children. For another, it’s the only safe harbor she can think to offer her sister.

The movies skip this plot detail entirely, which is interesting because it wouldn’t take a lot of time or explanation to insert into a movie. Instead, the movies lean into the notions of fate, faith, or coincidence. Nettie ends up in the house where Celie’s children are either by Divine guidance or utter happenstance. I guess it depends on which of these notions a particular viewer finds most compelling.

Family Revelations

In the book, Nettie learns the truth about her (and Celie’s) father from Samuel and Corrine, the missionary couple who adopted Celie’s children. Once she admits to being the children’s aunt, the missionaries tell her the story of how they got the kids–which reveals that Celie and Nettie’s actual father had been lynched. The man they knew as their father was actually their mother’s second husband. Nettie relays the information to Celie in a letter, and Celie drives out to visit the man she had known as a father to confirm. It’s still not great, but it does mean that Celie’s children weren’t the result of literal incest. Then, when the “father” dies, it is further revealed that the home he lived in and the land he had kept actually belonged to Celie and Nettie from their mother, so they inherit it.

Being honest, this is a complicated process. It involves a lot of steps for the information to be revealed, and it means that the information slowly drips out instead of coming all at once. You can get away with that in a novel, but it’s death for a movie. So, in both film adaptations, Nettie is removed from the process entirely and the reveal happens all at once. In both films, Celie finds out the truth about her father (and who owns the house and land he was living in) after he has died and his widow tries to settle his estate. It’s just a lot simpler that way.

Abbreviated Africa

Both movies save a lot of time by doing a sort of Cliff’s Notes version of Nettie’s time in Africa, although the 2023 adaptation does a better job portraying the white colonial issues even in abbreviated form. But both save even more time by erasing the complicated dynamics between Nettie, the missionary family she lives with, and the Africans they meet. In the book, Corrine, the adoptive mother of Celie’s kids, is suspicious of Nettie because of how much she looks like the kids. Eventually, Nettie tells Corrine and her husband, Samuel, the truth about her relationship to the children, and shortly after that Corrine passes away due to illness. At some point after that (it’s difficult to tell how much time passes in the books letters), Nettie and Samuel get married.

The 1985 movie hints at the complicated dynamics, including Corrine’s death and Nettie’s marriage to Samuel, but doesn’t focus on them. The 2023 movie skirts getting involved in these dynamics completely.

Mister’s Redemption

Another narrative that plays out too subtly to translate well to the screen is how the relationship between Celie and Mister changes at the end. Once Celie leaves Mister, her fortunes rise as she becomes a confident human being. On the other hand, Mister’s fortunes decline. When Celie inherits her “father’s” home and returns with her pants business, she and Mister slowly develop a surprising friendship. He has come to see her as a human being, and goes so far as to suggest that they marry again–but this time in spirit as well as in flesh. Celie correctly refuses (first because she’s a lesbian and second because absolutely not), but she does settle into a friendship with Mister, whom she begins to call by his true first name: Albert.

Both movies lean into a more theatrical way of showing Mister’s redemption arc. In the book, Celie essentially puts a curse on Mister when she leaves him–telling him that until he does right by her, everything he touches will crumble. But the novel doesn’t treat this like a literal curse, even though Mister does fall on hard times. The movies sure do, though, emphasizing the moment of the curse and that Mister needs to atone in a big way for the many abuses he inflicted on Celie. In the 2023 movie in particular, Mister seems to experience near-biblical misfortunes until he does right.

So the 1985 movie fabricated a scenario in which Mister gets a letter revealing that Nettie and Celie’s children are unable to get back into the country unless someone visits the immigration office and pays a hefty fine. Mister goes in, sorts out the paperwork, and pays the fine. In the 1985 movie, Mister’s role in Nettie’s return is not revealed–his reward is to watch their reunion from afar, knowing that he did something good for Celie. The 2023 movie borrows this plot development but adds some flourishes: Mister buys an unwanted pair of pants from Celie’s store as a show of good faith, wears them to Celie’s annual Easter dinner, and informs Celie that he has invited some special guests on her behalf, leading to the reveal of Nettie, Celie’s children, and Celie’s grandchildren.

The book just doesn’t have a “big moment” to illustrate Mister’s change and possible redemption. There’s a somewhat murkier friendship and mutual respect between Celie and Mister at the end. Both movies lean harder into a redemption arc for Mister, using the same (invented) plot device to show that he is a changed man in the end, which makes it easier for an audience to accept a friendship between them.

Both movies also give Mister’s father a larger presence, which gets at the idea that Mister’s cruelty is a generational trauma kind of thing. This is hinted at in the book but not really explored. The 1985 movie makes it a bit more overt, and the 2023 movie leans into it.

And in a little thing that makes a big difference: both movies use title cards to tell you what year it is, which helps you track the passage of time. The book doesn’t use dates, so it feels difficult to track how much time has passed between Celie’s letters at times.

What the 1985 Adaptation Changes

The biggest difference between the 1985 movie and Alice Walker’s novel is that the lesbian elements are almost entirely sanded out, essentially limited to a single scene where Celie and Shug share a kiss. I’ve seen interview clips with Whoopi Goldberg where she points out that at the time, it would have been impossible to portray a lesbian relationship in a way that would do justice to the book. That’s not entirely true, but I do concede that it would have caused the movie to face even more potential backlash than it already was (as I mentioned earlier, the NAACP was already protesting both the book and the film adaptation for perceived issues in representation). Still, it’s not necessarily that they couldn’t include the lesbian relationship so much as the lesbian relationship would have been a barrier to the film being embraced as a mainstream (read: profitable) movie. It’s a movie studio problem, not a genuine wall that they couldn’t have gotten over.

There is one thing I want to highlight that isn’t strictly speaking a difference so much as a great example of a movie pulling a detail from the book and using it to perfectly encapsulate something that would otherwise be difficult to portray. In the book, there are one or two insults lobbed at Celie about her smile. Whoopi Goldberg captures Celie’s insecurity and gets it across to the audience by having Celie repeatedly hide the lower part of her face anytime she smiles or laughs–or sometimes just because. It’s a beautiful detail that shows a fundamental understanding of the character, and it’s just another reason it’s a crime she didn’t win an Oscar for this performance.

And while the 1985 movie dials up a comedic sensibility that makes the movie palatable, it isn’t afraid to be, well, terrifying either. It opens with Celie and Nettie playing as children, which seems innocent and sweet until you get a full look at Celie and realize that she’s pregnant. A horrific scene of Celie in labor follows, including the moment her child is taken from her. The abuse she suffers at Mister’s hands is painful to see, and the movie truly makes the scene where Celie and Nettie are separated every bit as traumatic as it should be.

The 1985 movie follows up the separation with a scene in which Celie contemplates killing Mister with a razor while she shaves him. In the book, that only happens once, after Celie discovers that Mister has been hiding Nettie’s letters. In the 1985 movie, the later scene after the letter revelation mirrors this earlier moment.

Lastly (for our purposes), the 1985 movie shows the depths of Sofia’s suffering after she is arrested by having literal scars on her face.

There are a lot of other differences that I don’t significantly alter the story, like Celie’s father remarrying early on in the story. For timing purposes, we’ll leave it at that.

What the 2023 Adaptation Changes

Well, the biggest change is the most obvious: it’s a musical. So I’m not going to focus on that.

The next biggest change, to me, is something I already mentioned: that the musical is much more skittish about showing violence or abuse. It’s also much more shy about having the characters be cruel to one another. We don’t see how awful Mister’s kids were to Celie after she moved in (I guess that would make it hard to like Harpo later on?). Mister’s abuse is implied but rarely shown (again, perhaps to make it easier to believe his redemption later on?). We don’t even see Shug call Celie ugly upon first meeting her like she does in the book and in the 1985 film. It’s almost as if the 2023 adaptation is trying to be polite or not to upset anyone too badly. I like the movie, don’t get me wrong, but this is an odd choice to me.

Another big change is that for some reason, this movie moves the action to the Georgia coast so the characters can spend time on the beach.

I’ve complained a little, so here’s a good thing: the musical doesn’t shy away from Celie’s lesbian affection for Shug–and it shows the two of them waking up together in bed. There’s a whole song and dance about Celie’s feelings of attraction for Shug. It’s glorious. But, after that moment where they wake up together, the lesbian elements kind of fade away. So on the one hand, we made huge progress. On the other, it’s weird that the lesbian storyline essentially disappears halfway through the movie.

In an extension of how the film versions of The Color Purple handle Shug’s reactions to Mister’s violence toward Celie differently, in the book Shug and Celie plan their departure for Memphis together in advance. In the 2023 movie, Shug springs the idea on Celie spontaneously, recognizing that there are tensions about to boil over related to Mister hiding Nettie’s letters.

Speaking of Shug, her arrival in this adaptation is markedly different from previous incarnations in that in the book and 1985 movie, she is taken to Mister’s to recover from illness. That’s how she and Celie meet. In this adaptation, she comes to visit Mister and falls ill immediately upon arriving.

Another big difference is that while the movie shows Sofia’s arrest and covers her years in prison, and indicates that she will work for the mayor’s wife as a maid, it omits the hard toll those years as a maid had on Sofia and how they effectively worked as a second prison term.

The musical also largely omits the character of Mary Agnes (or Squeak, as she is initially known). She’s there, you know that she is with Harpo after he and Sofia split, she gets punched in the face by Sofia after trying to cut in when she and Harpo dance, and then she largely disappears until she decides to join Celie and Shug when they leave town. You only see her one more time after that, so a lot of her character arc is missing.

As with the 1985 movie, there are a lot more nuances and differences–Celie running into her infant daughter with her new mother while working in her father’s store and not out in town on her own, Celie only deciding to make pants after inheriting that store, and so on. The only other significant difference is that this movie moves the conversation that explains the title to a location earlier in the movie. In the novel and 1985 movie, Shug explains her views on religion to Celie later on in the story because everything Celie has been through is causing her to have a crisis of faith (including Shug’s view that God doesn’t like it if you walk by the color purple in a field without noticing it). In this version, Shug gives this speech not long after she and Celie first meet. It’s fine, but it loses some of the thematic resonance.

Which Version is Best?

The answer is almost always the book, and this is no different. The book just has more (more detail, more nuance, more characterization) than the running time of a movie can allow. So if you’re only going to engage with The Color Purple in one format, let it be the book. But again, just be aware that Alice Walker has developed some problematic ideas about Jewish and trans people in the years since it was published (more on that here).

As for the movies, each is good in its own way. I’m partial to the 1985 version because it captures the tone of the book better and doesn’t shy away from most of the difficult parts of the story (lesbianism aside). But as much as I’ve complained about the musical, it’s a pretty good adaptation, too. I just prefer the 1985 version if I had to choose.