Happy now: "The Color Purple"

It's a low bar to clear and we're very much splitting hairs here - hey, welcome to 21st century film criticism - but as films based on musicals based on films based on books go, the new The Color Purple is far more certain of itself than the new Mean Girls. As directed for the screen by Blitz Bazawule, who broke through with 2018's very striking Netflix find The Burial of Kojo before overseeing Beyoncé's batshit "visual album" Black is King, this is an unapologetically full-throated musical, such as the studio system once routinely produced; it unfolds on sets that must have been several times more expensive to build than anything its characters could afford; and it stars performers who look as though they could well carry a tune, supported by hundreds of extras leaping into terpsichorean action so as to sell us tried-and-tested jazz, soul and gospel-infused musical numbers. If I nevertheless emerged with reservations, they concerned whether Alice Walker's serious, sombre account of Black suffering and endurance in the American South of the early 20th century was really asking to be Disneyfied in this way; the entirely unresolved mismatch between the material and how it's presented to us made me wonder if we haven't collectively lost the plot as storytellers and consumers, and why some part of the American cinema insists upon sanitising and childproofing American history. Steven Spielberg's (I think honourable) adaptation of 1985 drew flak, not least for being directed by someone far removed from the milieu Walker was writing about, but it was never caught attempting to jolly the worst of the novel up, as Bazawule's putative crowdpleaser has to. The Spielberg approach was gravely sincere and empathetic, a tryout for later work in Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List and beyond. Bazawule's tone, confoundingly in places, is that of the builder on the scaffold, imploring the downtrodden women shuffling beneath his gaze to cheer up and crack a smile. Oppression?! Might never happen, love.

What's semi-intriguing is the attempt to use one two-hour film to digest not just Walker's novel and the Broadway extravaganza it inspired, but a whole array of 20th century Black art and experience, from Josephine Baker to Julie Dash. It's unarguably a big swing, but also as much moodboard as it is movie - the same issue that beset Bazawule's previous features. Dramatically, this Color is scattered and largely weightless. The performers of note (Taraji P. Henson as Shug, the newly Oscar-nominated Danielle Brooks as Sofia) are presented as if guest stars in a sitcom or soap, treated to thumpingly big introductions that the rest of Marcus Gardley's script cannot match; in large part, that's because this script flees in terror from Walker's darker material, much as the innocent young Nettie (Halle Bailey) flees the family home after her father abuses her - a scene this version doesn't dare visualise. For a long time, it seems as though almost as many atrocities will happen off-camera in this 12A-rated film as in the upcoming The Zone of Interest, but that's through evasiveness rather than conceptual choice; it toughens up a little towards the end once the execs have been persuaded the audience is staying seated, though even here, there's something a bit cowardly in the way God is called upon to dispense last-reel justice. Our heroines are largely spared, instead rerouted down picturesque backroads to songs with lines like "Life can never break your soul". Bazawule is demonstrably happier here - we all are - because he's moving back in the direction of Queen Bey music videos with their zippy rhythms and peppy energy; still, even these appear symptomatic of the prevailing urge to boil down and make nice. We get a beat or two more lesbianism than Spielberg filmed, albeit in a number involving a bathtub so thick with bubbles it'd be two weeks before either party saw any action; Walker's ideas about resistance are reduced to a three-minute song titled "Hell No". Clearly, Color Purple '24 is more ambitious than the money grub of Mean Girls '24: it wants to be taken seriously. Yet without this text's former wallop, too many of its scenes resemble those parodies of awards-season miserybait that showed up on 30 Rock, Family Guy and Key & Peele. After a while, I half-expected Jenna Maroney to dance on as Token Caucasian Lady.

The Color Purple opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.