There has been quite the hiatus, but seeing as how I’m very handsome I hope you’ll forgive me for shallow reasons.

Expect my review of “The Boondocks” Season 1 this week. 

Then I’ll also be reviewing Nicholas Winding Refn’s “Drive” for this week.

Next week will be my review of “The Boondocks” Season 2, followed up by Season 3.

I know you’re excited. You can dance if you want to. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7movKfyTBII&ob=av3e

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Review of “The Boondocks” Seasons 1-3
Review of “Drive”
Evolution of a Nerd: a comprehensive list of stuff I’ve flipped my opinion on over the years.

Spielberg’s 144-minute film adaptation of The Color Purple was released in 1985 to thunderous applause and critical adulation. The harrowing tale of the abuse, incest, and rape that black women experienced in the early half of the 20^th century, and the hope, love, and faith that gave them the strength to pull through resonated with audiences across the globe.  Or at least that’s what I’ve been told, since the film barely manages to eke out any of elements in the preceding litany while haphazardly barreling from one scene to the next. But we’ll get to that.

The Color Purple follows the life and growth of a hardworking and intelligent black girl named Celie Harris (Desreta Jackson/Whoopi Goldberg). Celie and her much-adored sister Nettie (Akosua Busia) live in a repressive home, working to the bone all day and being brutally beaten and raped by their father Pa Harris (Leonard Jackson) at night.

Then a young, handsome man named Albert Johnson (Danny Glover) comes calling for Nettie. When Pa Harris offers Celie instead, Albert grudgingly takes her for a wife. What first seems a blessed relief from her abusive father is revealed to be a curse very quickly, as Albert’s laziness and brutality immediately take their toll on Celie’s good-hearted nature. He beats her, rapes her, treats her like an animal, and, perhaps most painfully, forcibly separates her from Nettie, her only source of joy. Celie’s years into womanhood are a dismal routine until Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), the woman that Albert truly loves, comes calling.

After a rocky start, the two women develop a powerful friendship that might also be a romance. Shug’s strength teaches Celie to use her own, and she shares that strength and kindness to revive the free spirit of her beaten friend Sophia (Oprah Winfrey). After discovering that Albert has been hiding the letters Nettie has been writing her from Africa for many years, Celie confronts Albert and his cruel father Old Mister Johnson (Adolph Caesar), and leaves Albert for good.

Celie returns years later to rebuild and live in the house her father owned up until his death. She opens a women’s pants shop in town and lives her life in relative peace and wealthy satisfaction. One day, while she is preparing for a small party, her long-lost sister Nettie returns to her from Africa courtesy of Albert’s financing, towing alongside her a group of younger men and women that she reveals to be the same children that Celie’s father took from her so many years ago. The girls reunite in tears and laughter, playing patty-cake as the credits roll.

Now comes the part where I have to say that the above plot summary is being exceedingly kind to the muddled mish-mash of plot points and character arcs that is this film. Spielberg’s images are gorgeous and his actors are superb (with a few exceptions, but we’ll get to that), but nearly everything else in The Color Purple is a frustrating conglomeration of misplaced characters, confusingly rushed plotting, and a woeful lack of tone.

It is clear who the main character should be in this film. Celie’s journey is, primarily, the one we follow from the beginning to the end.  So this film should be diving into the actions and emotions of Celie, letting her character evolve and lead us through a journey from despair to hope. Should be. What The Color Purple does instead is have Celie’s voice dispassionately narrating nearly every scene she appears in while other characters lead her through the story like a pet dog. Despite a fair performance from Desreta Jackson and a remarkable performance from Whoopi Goldberg, we’re never given the insight into how this character truly feels, how she’s affected by the abuse, or where she finds the hope and strength to go beyond her past. The film treats her as if she’s not capable of taking care of herself at any time, which is as insulting as it is boring.

Meanwhile, side characters are given immense amount of action and screen time that overshadows Celie’s story. Chief among these are Sophia, Nettie, and Albert. Sophia’s tale of pride, incarceration, and eventual redemption shoves Celie into the background almost literally. The film spends nearly 20 minutes following Sophia as she punches a white man, goes to jail, comes home at Christmas, and is forced to leave her family behind again when her white master spazzes out in her new car and makes ridiculous faces at the camera.  Oprah’s brilliant performance aside, the entire scene following her release could have been completely cut and the movie would have been more streamlined and cohesive. All we really need to know about Sophie’s troubles within Celie’s story is that her spirit is broken in prison and revived when Celie finally stands up to Albert, so anything else is just baggage, and there’s a hell of a lot of that.

The same goes for Nettie, whose African tale butts violently into the main storyline like a rampaging elephant’s tusk.  The Color Purple stops dead in its tracks after Celie discovers that Albert has been keeping all of Nettie’s letters in the floorboards of his closet. It’s played like a climax and for a moment the scene is pretty touching when Celie bursts into a tearful smile of renewed hope. But this climactic moment is immediately undercut by a tediously drawn-out sequence that once again shoves Celie to the side in order to tell a story that, like so many of the subplots, just gets in the way of the film. Celie spends the next fifteen minutes sitting down in various 30’s-themed calendar photos while Nettie’s voice takes over the narration and the film crew takes a trip to Africa. The scenes are breathtakingly gorgeous and chock full of great acting and wicked cool zebras, but they don’t mean a damned thing for Celie’s plot, which is put on pause while we are beckoned over to the setting for The English Patient.

Albert’s arc doesn’t become a problem until the film nears its many climactic finales (although he is a problem from the very beginning, but we’ll get to that). Somewhere between the rampaging elephants, pantsuit stores, and show-stopping musical numbers (oh how I wish I were kidding about that last) The Color Purple abruptly changes its jumbled mind about Albert and decides that he’s really a good man at heart. Never mind that the story up until the last few minutes establishes him as a drunken, lazy, brutal, sexist, and sick-minded coward. No, let’s just toss that right out the window and show him suddenly deciding to use all of his hidden chicken-coop money to bring Nettie home, and then have him stare, all soft-eyed and compassionate in the sunset, as the two sisters reunite. It doesn’t help in the least that by the time we reach this senselessly useless moment, the movie has dragged us through about five climaxes. By the time the credits roll, we can’t be sure whose story it is anymore because the movie itself has no idea. It’s more than two hours long and for the majority of that time it’s focused on watching everyone act but Celie or watching Celie react to everyone else’s acting.

This possibly would be bearable (key word: possibly) if the film’s pace didn’t have so much in common with a group of ADHD-positive children in a candy factory. It settles when it should be moving forward, and runs at breakneck speed when it should take a moment to reflect. In all this zany motion, important plot points are thrown into your face more than developed, and they disappear just as soon as they arrive. At one point, The Color Purple skips 8 years of the characters’ lives just to skip ahead another 6 years only 10 minutes later. Movement like this leaves behind great opportunities for an audience to connect with characters, and I wouldn’t even call this the worst example in the film. There are two instances, both between Shug and Celie, that are far, far worse.

When Harpo (Willard Pugh), Sophia’s husband, first opens his juke joint he invites Shug Avery to come sing. Her natural voice talent, glamorous beauty, and powerful charm lights up the haphazard shack, and the film, like a bonfire. After singing an energetic and soulful number woefully intercut with shots of the audience making hilariously silly faces, Shug begins a song she calls “Miss Celie Blues”. It’s a tender moment between Shug and the shy, berated Celie, who up until this moment was just sitting quietly in a corner while the film went on without her. In this scene the two women connect on a near-spiritual level over their mirror-image relationship with Albert and their paralleling struggles as young black women. By itself, and with the exception of a few idiotic moments, the scene is a gorgeous little nugget of gold. But in the context of the film, this scene makes no sense at all.

Before Harpo’s Juke Joint, Shug and Celie interacted only three times. When Shug first arrives to Albert’s home, she is staggeringly drunk and jealous of Celie’s relationship (this term used very loosely) with Albert. Later, Celie shoves a tray of food into Shug’s room, and then Shug shoves an empty tray right back out. The third time they meet before the juke joint, Shug is bathing alone. Celie enters the room and, after a brief conversation that suggests the women might learn to get along, gives Shug a good sponging-down. After these three encounters, there is the possibility of friendship, but only the possibility. A friendship has not actually been established or developed. The women barely know each other, even if they both have an inkling of what each has gone through with Albert. They haven’t had a single conversation that exceeded five minutes onscreen, but this film decides to mask their shallow relationship with a song-and-dance number that tries to convince the audience that both women understand each other completely and have been really sharing each other’s pain this whole time.

This mask becomes a garish hooded cowl in their next scene together. After some touching moments where Shug gets Celie to try on an extravagant costume and then laugh without hiding her smile, we’re stunned by the plot point from space when the women begin tenderly kissing each other. Shug’s desire may be somewhat believable, considering her general lustiness, but at no point in this film are we ever given the slightest hint that Celie’s problems with sex stems from a natural desire for women. The most logical conclusion, right up until this point, is that Celie hates sex because she spent her childhood being raped by her father and the rest of the time being savaged by Albert.  But even if we are to accept that she has suddenly become a lesbian without any precursors, the fact that she is a lesbian is never mentioned or alluded to again, which makes every single little moment in this scene, no matter how wonderful, completely pointless within the context of the film.  

The Color Purple has a plethora of moments like these. Thousands of little subplots and lines of exposition are rushed to and through in this movie’s haste to go absolutely nowhere. It glosses over or completely discards the moments where characters and relationships are, or could be, developed. It focuses all its power on what it thinks are the big important ideas without giving us a world in which we could actually believe in them.

These sins, however crippling, are not what ultimately kills this film. All of my points above this paragraph can be argued against. It wouldn’t be a very strong case, but you could still put up a defense for the flaws in this film that I’ve noted so far. But what no human being on this earth could ever make a case for is this film’s incredible disregard for tone. 

Say, when you go to see a film whose subject is the rape and abuse of black women in the early 20^th century, how much slapstick comedy would like? If you answered “very little or none”, you’re in the right frame of mind. If you answered “Slapstick comedy in a film of this nature would trivialize the very real, very horrible things that black women went through during this period. There is nothing funny about a past full of incestuous rape, physical, and emotional abuse. There is a major line between using humor as a therapeutic defense mechanism and literally laughing at the victim of a lifetime of such abuse, and slapstick comedy would cross that line”, you’re in my frame of mind. But if you answered “Yes, please! I find the abuse of women funny or I can’t be bothered to dwell on it and need a constant source of distraction”, then The Color Purple may be just the film for you.

Celie’s story is, or at least should be, about the triumph of hope, faith, friendship, and self-discovery over sexism, racism, and the systematic abuse of women. But this message is hardly present in a film where Albert’s dependence on using Celie like a dog or housemaid is seen as hilarious. Even when the film tries to get back to some sort of meaningful core, it instantly buries itself under a pile of lowbrow comedy. We are called to witness Harpo as a bumbling buffoon that constantly trips, drops things, and falls through ceilings into living rooms. We watch as a single slap from Sophia in the water-borne juke joint sends Harpo’s very momentary girlfriend, appropriately named Squeak (annoyingly performed by …) sliding across the floor and into an open trapdoor to the river below. We are forced to endure a painfully stupid sequence where Albert struggles to cook up a meal for the half-conscious Shug and (wouldn’t you know it folks?) burns some of it! Wah-wahs all around!

Every time Spielberg gets close to really defining a powerful moment in this movie he pulls back and tosses us a shovel-load of childish comedy, like a child who dips his toe in the deep end of the pool and then loudly pronounces the water is too cold before chickening out. The tasteless icing on this insult-cake is Quincy Jones’ score, which I swear is one part Bambi, two parts Toy Story, and wholly pervasive.

The music barely ever quits playing and it never fits the tone of the scene. When Albert is pulling Celie and Nettie apart in what should be a gritty, heart-wrenching scene, the music is playing a carefree major chord that would fit snugly on a romantic comedy. When Celie first walks into Albert’s kitchen and holds witness to his disgusting laziness, the score plays a whimsical little tune that joins Albert’s other children in laughing at her misery and misfortune.  It mindlessly plays light-hearted hero tunes combined with African tribal music when Celie finally confronts Albert at the dinner table. It even uses a recorder, the most cheerfully juvenile of all wind instruments aside from the kazoo, to noisily ruin a few introspective moments.

Where in most films the silence of the score is indicative of its mastery over your emotions, here the silence is a blessing from the gods. The silence becomes a momentary glimpse into how powerful the film could have been if a lot of its darkness wasn’t tampered with by musical nonsense. The high tension of the first shaving scene is due in part to the absence of music. We are left to watch and listen as the razor in a fearful girl’s trembling hands slowly scrapes stubble from a cruel man’s exposed neck, knowing that if she slips even in the slightest she’ll be, at the very least, beaten to within an inch of her life. Compare it with the second shaving scene, in which African tribal music (and constant jump-cuts to an African scarring ritual) dissipates the tension and replaces it with nonsensical goofiness. 

The story is: Jones demanded that if Spielberg used him to produce the The Color Purple, he would also have to let him develop the score. Jones was the keen mind behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller album (among others), so this might have seemed a good idea at first. But I have a hard time believing that Spielberg couldn’t at some point during the process see where it was heading. I have an even harder time figuring out why he wouldn’t have done something about it. The score is an insulting, tone-deaf mess in a film with such a dark and complex subject. Like the rest of the film, it has no idea what it’s doing or where it’s going.

I don’t know how The Color Purple was given 11 Oscar nominations (including, ridiculously, Best Original Score) beyond the performance nods. I simply cannot see how people were so blinded and, in many cases, are still so blinded as to think that this is one of Spielberg’s best films. The performances are amazing, and the film’s look is gorgeous, but when I said the film drags you through, I meant it. To be more precise, the film puts a blindfold on your head, spins you around ten or twenty times, bops you over the head with a bat, and then drags you behind a truck running at top speed. By the time it’s finished, you’re disoriented and in a strange place with no idea how you got there and no time to think about it, but you know you’ve been wronged somehow. 

Further exploration:

• ·         http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088939/
• ·         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_Purple_(film)
• ·         http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-color-purple-collectors-edition-dvd,12087/

All images (c) 1985 WARNER BROTHERS PICTURES and AMBLIN ENTERTAINMENT