The Color Purple is about a pair of poor black Southern girl who are separated in the late 1910s. One vanishes while the other is stuck in an abusive marriage which she struggled to free herself from over the course of many decades. That’s a pretty basic, bare-bones description to something thematically richer.

I don’t have much memory of Spielberg’s Color Purple and I haven’t read the book or seen the stage musical adaptation. All I can say for sure is that I like what they came up… though I’m not 100% convinced the drama and musical sides always fit well together.

Which is a funny thing to say because both the drama and the musical numbers are great. In fact, the musical performances in the first half are so good, I was actively rooting for more. That’s rare for me to say as not exactly the most dedicated musical theater kind of guy. But, yeah, I was much more engaged with these powerful songs early on.

Special note to an amazing dream sequence set in an in-movie 1920s musical… it starts out black and white in the way such performances would be seen and then switches to glorious color. It’s just one of many amazing looking, well choreographed numbers in the flick

And then the movie goes and makes me cry a little bit at the end just by re-introducing a song diegetically from earlier in the flick. No longer was the song a pause-the-movie musical number, but actually, tangibly happens to the characters during a powerful reunion.

All this talk about music makes it sounds like I missed all the drama. But the acting and writing are pretty great too. All the actors are putting in the work, sometimes with mighty unlikable characters. It’s also shot beautifully with amazing natural lighting, great costumes, and design.

This is a very good musical drama that sometimes works better as a musical and other times as a drama. Not sure an argument can be made it needed music… and certainly Spielberg’s version of the story proves that, but what they came up with was very good.

Score: 87