Word: spielberger
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...town close to artistic exhaustion, a go project is The Jewel of the Nile, a sequel to a ripoff (Romancing the Stone) of a canny remake (Raiders of the Lost Ark) of a '40s Saturday-matinee serial. And a winner is something as automatic as a Steven Spielberg special (last year he produced Back to the Future and The Goonies), a Sylvester Stallone sequel (Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rocky IV) or a comedy from Saturday Night Live alumni (this year's three Chevy Chase films, Fletch, National Lampoon's European Vacation and Spies Like Us, were among...
...into cheap sentimentality. Celie learns that Nettie and her own two children by her father are living as missionaries in Africa. As a result, we are treated to dream sequences of elephants crashing through the fields of Georgia. This is one of the film's most colossal flaws: whenever Spielberg has trouble interpreting the text, he slips into the trademark Raidersesque exoticism and trick camera shots-gimmickery which has made him famous but which destroys the tone of the story...
...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...
...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...
...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...