Word: realisms
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STRIP AWAY THAT humor and one is left with a grim reality. As is, the movie is filled with an almost unrelenting--even unbearable--realism. For all his affection for that city of "people, traffic, and restaurants," Allen cannot conceal the fact that New York City can be a lonely place. It is a place of lonely singles who entrust their lives to doctors and analysts, where highbrow culture is merely an expensive distraction from ennui, and where material riches can not compensate for spiritual bankruptcy...
...television, The Trip to Bountiful survived three decades of artistic limbo before making it to the silver screen. Its troubled odyssey explains both why the film is so resolute, and why its scope is so limited. Visually splendid, The Trip to Bountiful is inspiring despite its stark, biting realism. But there is frustratingly little plot development: never is the movie threatening, and rarely is it even surprising. As an audience, we are awed, but not challenged...
...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...
...exception to this misplaced descent into escapism concerns the scene in Which Celie finally severs her ties with Mister, calling him a creep and setting off with Shug to build a new life. For these few minutes, Spielberg achieves the mix of realism and spiritual triumph that elsewhere evades him. The movie ends with a reunion scene between Celie and Nettie, an obvious Spielbergian tear-jerker that would have been pardonable had the rest of the movie followed a different course...
Spielberg's biggest mistake, though, was not resurrecting good ol' black and white film. He would have lost none of Walker's spirituality. And the realism of The Elephant Man or Raging Bull could have been...