The Color Purple: Movie Review

SWEETNESS and stridency exist side by side in Alice Walker's ''Color Purple,'' a book whose great virtue is the conversational immediacy that lets its characters spring to life on the page. In Steven Spielberg's film version, which opens today at the Beekman and other theaters, the characters are also big and vibrant, but beyond that they resemble Miss Walker's barely at all. Mr. Spielberg has looked on the sunny side of Miss Walker's novel, fashioning a grand, multi-hanky entertainment that is as pretty and lavish as the book is plain. If the book is set in the harsh, impoverished atmosphere of rural Georgia, the movie unfolds in a cozy, comfortable, flower-filled wonderland. It does not much matter that the film lacks fidelity to Miss Walker's tone; a lot of her book is too blunt to have been successfully translated to the screen anyhow. What's more crucial is the film's peculiar unevenness, and its way of combining such wild extremes. Some parts of it are rapturous and stirring, others hugely improbable, and the film moves unpredictably from one mode to another. From another director, this might be fatally confusing, but Mr. Spielberg's showmanship is still with him. Although the combination of his sensibilities and Miss Walker's amounts to a colossal mismatch, Mr. Spielberg's ''Color Purple'' manages to have momentum, warmth and staying power all the same.

Realism and grit, the signal qualities of Miss Walker's story, are all but absent here, being largely irrelevant to what Mr. Spielberg has in mind. His film is an upbeat, affirmative fable in which optimism, patience and family loyalty emerge as cardinal virtues, and in which even the wife-beating villain has charm. Although Celie, the story's shy young heroine, lives a life filled with disappointment and hardship, even the most brutal events are set forth in a storybook style. A scene in which the teen-age Celie (played affectingly by Desreta Jackson) is forcibly separated from her beloved sister Nettie (Akosua Busia) should be the film's most wrenching episode, but it is so awash in music that the impact is muted. Quincy Jones's too-ubiquitous score has this effect on much of the movie.

Several years later, Celie has grown so much that her voice is an octave lower, and she has become Whoopi Goldberg; however, she still wears the same dress, and it still looks brand new. The opening portion of the film quickly outlines some key events: that Celie has borne two children by the man she knows as her own father, only to have the babies taken away from her, and that she has been forced to marry the widower she calls ''Mister'' (Danny Glover). When Celie goes to live at her new husband's farm and help raise his children, she endures all manner of indignities. Her new stepson throws a rock at her, giving Celie a bloody forehead and causing her to leave one perfect, bloody handprint in the snow. The house is knee-deep in trash, but no sooner has Celie tirelessly cleaned it from top to bottom - as only movie heroines can - than her husband plops his muddy boots onto the kitchen table.



The workings of this new household are unfathomable at times. The farm is large, surrounded by healthy looking crops, yet it's never clear who tends the fields or when there is even time. The yard is filled with children, never quite identified, who don't seem to age as Celie and her husband do. And the whole operation prospers for decades, even during the depths of the Depression, until Celie finally finds the gumption to leave her husband for his mistress, a glamorous singer named Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), with whom Celie has fallen physically and spiritually in love. After this, when Celie has been gone only a few months or so, the kitchen fills up with goats and chickens, the mailbox becomes dented and pocked by bullet holes and a shutter falls off the farmhouse - on cue.

If this kind of broad simplification suggests caricature, the actors mostly rise above their roles. Miss Goldberg is limited at first, forced to shrug and cower in a manner that seems highly improbable in someone so evidently savvy. But she eventually grows into a tremendously compelling figure, with a huge, radiant smile that's even more powerful as her formidable scowl. Oprah Winfrey, as Celie's stepdaughter-in-law Sophia, has the most exaggeratedly comic role in the film, but she handles it gracefully. As her husband Harpo, Willard Pugh takes repeated comic pratfalls from various roofs and ceilings, but he still gives a gentle and likable performance.

Mr. Glover somehow makes a very sympathetic villain - but Adolph Caesar, as his father, mugs so excessively that he seems to have wandered in from another movie. And Margaret Avery makes Shug warmly magnetic, though without the kind of sensuality that Miss Walker describes. Indeed, the sole bedroom scene between Celie and Shug plays as an innocent, friendly encounter between two very nice people, and it ends with a shot of wind chimes. The few scenes introducing white actors into an otherwise all-black cast are among the film's most awkward, but that may be built into ''The Color Purple'' anyhow. One of the most unwieldy episodes in Miss Walker's book is similarly troublesome in the movie: it shows what happens after Sophia, having been sorely provoked, attacks a white woman who is the mayor's wife. Sophia goes to prison for long enough to see her health and her spirit broken, and when she emerges, she is hired by the mayor's wife as a servant. On Christmas day, Sophia's first chance to see her family in years, her employer plays Lady Bountiful and allows Sophia to drive home for the day, but 15 minutes later Sophia is torn away from her relatives.

Miss Walker writes this as an example of sheer heartlessness from the mayor's wife; Mr. Spielberg directs it as a kind of slapstick, which doesn't work either. What emerges is a sense that Mr. Spielberg, in finding a more serious and adult project for himself than the fantasy films for which he is so well known, could not have chosen more difficult material. But ''The Color Purple'' finds him ready and able to make the transition. And it is vigorous enough to indicate he will undoubtedly fare better next time.