Word: colorations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Color Purple...
THIS IS ONE instance where black and white would have been better than color. The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker's gritty but triumphant novel and Steven Spielberg's debut directing a "serious" film, suffers from too much technicolor, too much flash in the face of the book's grimy realism. Spielberg transforms scenes that portrayed the grim existence of Southern agrarian Blacks into fields of dreamy and idealistic color that resemble an explosion at an Izod Lacoste factory more than they do images of rural life in backwoods Georgia...
...giving birth to a child by her father and being married off to a man she doesn't know. This is pretty horrible stuff, especially for a sixteen-year-old, but some of the disgust we are meant to feel is lost among the wash of color and high quality production. Unable to communicate subtly the extent of the father's shortcomings, Spielberg is forced to rely on a line from the script in which father tells daughter to "hurry up" while she's in labor...
...FAIR, Spielberg faced an almost impossible task in dealing with this movie. Adaptations of novels are harder to perfect than are original screenplays. The Color Purple poses an especially difficult problem for the potential adaptor, both because the book was widely read and because it adheres to the problematic first-person narrative format. Spielberg seems to realize the latter difficulty and attempts to avoid that puzzle simply by abandoning Celie's first-person narration within the first half hour of the movie. Another difficulty is length. The movie clocks in at two and a half hours, approximately the same time...
Maybe someday, if future directors remember black and white, the complexity of Walker's novel will be better served. Until then, for those who read the book, The Color Purple remains a technicolor yawn...