141 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Blitz Bazawule turns Alice Walker’s novel into a full-blown movie musical, all gospel choirs and dream-sequence spectacle. Celie spends decades surviving men who treat her as property. The songs are the loophole that lets her speak.
Celie is a Black woman in early-twentieth-century Georgia who is handed from an abusive father to an abusive husband before she turns twenty. She loses her sister Nettie, the one person who loves her. She survives by going silent and small. Blitz Bazawule stages this story as a musical, and the choice does real work. The numbers are not decoration. They are the interior life of a woman who is not allowed to say what she feels out loud.
Fantasia Barrino plays Celie with a stillness that breaks open in song. She holds her body folded inward for most of the film. When she finally stands straight, the change reads on her face before she says a word. Taraji P. Henson plays Shug Avery as a jazz singer who moves like she owns every room and teaches Celie that pleasure is allowed. Danielle Brooks plays Sofia with a defiance that the world punishes brutally, and Brooks tracks the cost of that punishment in her posture and her eyes. Colman Domingo plays Mister as a man capable of cruelty and self-pity in the same breath.
Bazawule directs with a painter’s eye, and Marcus Gardley’s screenplay compresses decades without losing the through-line of Celie’s awakening. The film slips between realism and fantasy. A juke-joint number opens up into a giant gramophone record that Celie and Shug stride across. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen lights the Georgia fields in warm amber and saves cooler tones for the scenes of confinement. The dream sequences signal that we are inside Celie’s imagination, the only place she controls.
This is a film about a woman who learns that her own voice belongs to her. The musical form is the argument, not a gimmick laid over the drama. Celie cannot speak her rage or her desire in the world she lives in, so the film lets her sing them. Bazawule trusts the spectacle to carry the emotion, and the ensemble gives him the voices to justify that trust.