“The Color Purple” PEOPLE Review: Fantasia Barrino Stars in a Triumphant Movie Musical

Taraji P. Henson and Danielle Brooks are standouts in the film, co-produced by Oprah Winfrey

The year comes to an end with a happy surprise. Based on the hit musical and directed by Blitz Bazawule, The Color Purple is perhaps the most satisfying adaptation yet of Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer-winning novel, as well as one of the most impressive films of 2023. In other words, it's enjoying what co-producer Oprah Winfrey might call its best life.

This Purple unfolds with a rhapsodic ease and confidence that Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie never really achieved — it was swamped by an awkward lyricism.

Here the singing and choreography move the story onto a different plane that’s more dreamlike and occasionally fantastical.

One number takes place on a giant phonograph, another segues into a black-and-white fantasy that becomes, in effect, a movie musical within a movie musical. It’s all closer to fable, burnishing an innocence that glows at the story’s center.

But fables tend to be full of suffering too (and in Purple the pain to be endured reflects the bleak reality of Black life in the Jim Crow South).

Celie (Fantasia Barrino), poor and unloved, is married off to the cruel Mister (Rustin’s magnetic Colman Domingo) and deprived of the friendship of her sister Nettie (played in early scenes by The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey, who’s entrancing).

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Then, after years of misery, Celie is almost magically elevated to a state of happily-ever-after thanks to the arrival of Shug Avery, a singer and old flame of Mister’s. Taraji P. Henson is magnificent in the role, as is Danielle Brooks as fiery Sofia (played by Winfrey in Spielberg’s film).

Henson brings playfulness, sensuality and flirtatious humor to the film, while Brooks is defiantly salt-of-the-earth with an astonishing Gospel voice (not for nothing did she play Mahalia Jackson in a Lifetime movie). They enrich Purple with what in the end are two harmonious forms of the human spirit, one giddily disregarding unhappiness, the other plowing straight into it.

Related: The Color Purple Actress Phylicia Pearl Mpasi on the Shocking Text — Then Call — She Received from Oprah (Exclusive)

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Henson and Brookes, both in their performances and the characters they play, overshadow Barrino’s sad, recessive Celie. Barrino, who speaks in a husky, papery voice, doesn’t manage to make something eloquent out of the quiet stillness of the role, unlike Whoopi Goldberg in the Spielberg film. Barrino tends to disappear all too well.

Then, at long last, the former American Idol powerhouse gets to deliver a roof-rattling solo number. She kills it.

The Color Purple is in theaters Christmas Day.

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