Review: 'The Color Purple' is as difficult to translate to the screen as a musical as it was in 1985

Maybe it’s the case that Alice Walker’s acclaimed novel “The Color Purple,” like Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” or Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is actually unfilmable — and neither Steven Spielberg’s achingly earnest 1985 adaptation nor this new musical version can fully convey the pain and resilience of the story’s protagonist, Celie Harris.

The story spans some 40 years, starting in 1909, with two sisters — Celie (played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi in the early going) and Nettie (Halle Bailey, recently of “The Little Mermaid”) — living with their father (Deon Cole), who frequently abuses and rapes Celie, and has fathered two babies by her. Early on in this film, Celie gives birth to the second one (Whoopi Goldberg, who played Celie in the Spielberg version, makes her cameo as the midwife), and the father takes the baby away while Celie is still recovering.

Soon after, their father arranges for Celie to be married off to a widower who goes by Mister (played by Colman Domingo). Mister orders Celie — played as an adult by Fantasia Barrino (the one-time “American Idol” champ) — to cook and clean, and take even more abuse than her father gave out. The ultimate act of horror comes when Mister banishes Nettie at the point of a shotgun, separating the sisters apparently forever.

Celie has so internalized her abuse that when Mister’s adult son, Harpo (Corey Hawkins), brings home his confident, headstrong girlfriend, Sofia (Danielle Brooks), Celie tells Harpo that to keep Sofia in line, he should beat her — an idea that makes Sofia furious at Celie. (Those who saw the Spielberg version will remember that Sofia was played, in her movie debut, by Oprah Winfrey, who’s a producer of the new movie.)

Harpo decides to start a juke joint, a place by the river to serve booze and book music acts — and the first act he lures in is the Memphis soul singer Shug Avery (played by Taraji P. Henson). Shug has been Mister’s longtime mistress, and her framed photo has become an object of fascination for Celie over the years. When Shug and Celie finally meet, there is an instant bond, whether sisterly or something else.

What I haven’t mentioned yet – and not because the studio marketing is trying to hide it — is that this version of “The Color Purple” is a full-on Broadway musical, adapted from Marsha Norman’s book of the stage play by screenwriter Marcus Gardley. 

Being a musical exacerbates the difficulty an actor would have portraying Celie, a passive and meek character for so much of the movie’s running time, who finally gets to show her resolve and unbreakable spirit in the final few minutes. It was hard for Spielberg to have Goldberg perform that arc; it’s even harder when you also must give the character songs to sing. 

What director Blitz Bazawule (who worked on part of Beyoncé’s “Black Is King” video album) and the script do is stage elaborate dream sequences to show Celie’s inner thoughts — including a Busby Berkeley-style old Hollywood number when Celie and Shug first meet. Only in the later going, when Barrino gets to belt out the declaration “I’m Here,” does the actor and character finally get to show her fire.

So much of this rendition of “The Color Purple” feels hemmed in by conventions — trying to get across the quiet, nuanced emotions of Walker’s book in a format that demands big, loud declarative moments of showing one’s heart. In spite of the abundant talent onscreen and behind the camera, that emotional gap proves insurmountable.

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‘The Color Purple’

★★1/2

‘Opens Monday, December 25, Christmas Day. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, violence and language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'Poor Things' is an absurd masterpiece of a growing mind, centered by a stunning performance by Emma Stone

It’s no small thing to call “Poor Things” the most audacious movie the the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has made in the English language — not when that includes such swing-for-the-fences titles as “The Favourite,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “The Lobster.”

But “Poor Things,” a science-fiction movie in the “Frankenstein” vein that’s also a bawdy sex farce and a satirical journey of feminine self-discovery, tops all of Lanthimos’ past Hollywood work for its audacity and  wit. It’s also a movie that boasts a new level of acting from Emma Stone — someone we loved already, and are thrilled to find has found new mountains to conquer.

When we meet Stone’s Bella, she has the mind of a child. Quite literally. She’s the ward of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a scientist with radical notions (for this unspecified but vaguely Victorian era) about how to maintain and prolong life, as evidenced by the odd hybrid animals walking around his London courtyard.

As Dr. Baxter tells his student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), Bella was found floating in the Thames, a would-be suicide. She was dead, but the nearly born fetus inside her was alive. So Dr. Baxter transferred the baby’s brain into Bella’s skull, and has been raising her in the Baxter house. Max, who is soon hired as an assistant, chronicles how Bella goes from baby talk to primitive English in short order. 

Bella learns so quickly that she soon wants more than what Dr. Baxter and Max can teach her cooped up in the house. Bella wants to see the world, so she runs off with Dr. Baxter’s lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Duncan takes Bella to Lisbon to experience the pleasures of good food and sexual intercourse — she calls it “furious jumping” — both of which Bella discovers she likes to do frequently.

Eventually, though, Bella develops even deeper levels of thinking — through which she discovers such things as poor people, money and morality. She also realizes that Duncan is a rake and a cad, and doesn’t like that she continues to improve her mind through books. When they are dumped off a cruise ship because Duncan has run out of funds, Bella seeks her own adventure in Paris.

Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara (who co-wrote “The Favourite”), adapting the novel by Alasdair Gray, create a fully realized and quite magical world, which opens in wonder in direct proportion to Bella’s ability to take it all in. It’s a clever trick Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (another alum of “The Favourite”) pull, using black and white, a boxy screen ratio and constricting fish-eye lens when Bella has a baby’s brain, then expanding the vista and the palette as her mind grows. The production design shows equal leaps in creativity, from the wrought-iron machinery of Dr. Baxter’s lab to the luxury of Lisbon.

Lanthimos also surrounds Stone with a colorful supporting cast. Dafoe and Ruffalo are both superb as the extreme personalities in Bella’s life, and Youssef’s calm as the wide-eyed Max balances them well. Other fascinating faces — in roles I won’t divulge here, so you can learn their surprises in turn — belong to Kathryn Hunter (from Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth”), the comedian Jerrod Carmichael, Margaret Qualley, Christopher Abbott and the German legend Hanna Schygulla.

It’s Stone’s performance, though, that brings the wonder of “Poor Things” into focus. She channels all the steps of Bella’s mental progression — from babbling babyhood to sublime intelligence — with precision and wit, but also with warmth and tenderness. Stone finds both the humor and the heartache of Bella’s unique perspective on the world and its people, and creates a performance that is in the stratosphere of acting. It’s a master class in the middle of a masterpiece.

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‘Poor Things’

★★★★

Opens Friday, December 22, in theaters. Rated R for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore, and language. Running time: 141 minutes.

Review: 'Ferrari' is a fascinating portrait of an auto legend, and how he could file away parts of his life as he pursued the winner's circle

Director Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” on paper, should not work — not with two Californians and a Spaniard playing the three parts of an Italian romantic triangle, set against the business machinations of one of the world’s signature auto companies. 

However, because Mann (“The Insider,” “Miami Vice” and others) is as driven and audacious as Enzo Ferrari himself, the result is an intense, moving portrait of a man who has compartmentalized his life to get what he most wants in life.

Adam Driver plays Enzo Ferrari, thankfully not in a cradle-to-grave biopic, but in a story — the screenplay is credited to British writer Troy Kennedy Martin (who wrote the 1969 original “The Italian Job” and died in 2009) — that focuses on one pivotal year, 1957. Ferrari’s car company, founded a decade earlier by Enzo and his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), is on the verge of collapse, having run up debts because Enzo spends more developing his custom sports cars than rich people spend buying them.

Enzo is working to make a deal with a big backer, the American automaker Ford Motor Co., that will keep the company afloat, and expand their business to making 400 cars a year. To make the sale, though, Ferrari needs to show what it can do in a race, specifically the Mille Miglia, an approximately 1,000-mile race through Italy’s city streets and country roads. Enzo learns, though, that a team from rival Maserati is also entering the race — and they need to win to avoid bankruptcy, too.

To finish the deal with Ford, Enzo needs Laura to sign over her control in Ferrari stock. While she’s meeting a bank manager, she learns a secret Enzo has kept from her for years: His second home, where his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), lives with their 10-year-old son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese). This is an emotional blow to Laura, whose own son, Alfredo, died at 24 from a form of muscular dystrophy. 

Between visits with Lina and arguments with Laura, Enzo keeps his focus on the Mille Miglia, by assembling a team of drivers. They include the veteran Italian driver Piero Taruffi (Patrick Dempsey), the British driver Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell) and a hotshot new driver, Alfonso De Portago (Gabriel Leone). Alfonso brings with him more paparazzi than Ferrari already has — because of his love affair with American actress Linda Christian (Sarah Gadon), who had just divorced from Tyrone Power.

Mann puts his focus on Driver’s extraordinary performance. Like a race driver, which he was before Alfredo was born, Ferrari is looking around every corner, calculating the angles, looking for those narrow lanes to move ahead — and Driver’s performance shows us that mind at work, shutting out such distractions as love and grief in pursuit of the winner’s circle.

The capstone of Mann’s direction, though, is the breathtaking re-creation of the 1957 Mille Miglia. Mann captures the speed of the cars, the dangers of the road, and the likelihood of death — not only for racers, but for spectators who get too close to the action. 

“Ferrari” is that rare movie where the visual spectacle matches the emotional stakes underneath. It shows a man balancing tragedy and triumph in the same moment, and it shows the costs he pays for being able to think about one and shut out the other.

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‘Ferrari’

★★★1/2

Opens Monday, December 25, Christmas Day. Rated R for some violent content/graphic images, sexual content and language. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'The Iron Claw' piles a lot of acting talent in an emotionally shallow telling of a tragedy-filled wrestling family drama

It would be glib to call writer-director Sean Durkin’s “The Iron Claw” a family drama on steroids — though it would be accurate, since the musclebound Von Erich brothers, scions of a Texas pro-wrestling legend in the ‘70s and ’80s, are occasionally shown injecting before entering the squared circle.

The description is apt, metaphorically, because this “inspired by a true story” drama amps up the pain and and emotional isolation of the Von Erichs, constantly driving themselves to the brink of athletic greatness and personal tragedy to please their demanding father, to almost unbelievable levels. 

The shock comes after the movie, when you look up the Von Erichs’ Wikipedia entry and find out things were even worse for the Von Erichs than was shown on screen.

The dad’s real name was Jack Barton Adkisson, but his professional name was Fritz Von Erich, and he — played with sharp menace by Holt McCallany — made his bones on the Texas pro wrestling circuit as a “heel,” a recurring bad guy who delighted in the boos of the crowd as he used his signature move, called The Iron Claw, on an opponent’s face. But Fritz never got his shot at the title belt, so he’s raised his sons to do what he could not.

The oldest living son — Jack Jr., we’re told, died at age 6 — is Kevin Von Erich, played by an impressively beefed-up Zac Efron. He’s the strongest wrestler of his brothers, but not the fastest talker. So when the time comes to choose someone to build up for a title shot, Dad picks the next in line, David (played by Harris Dickinson), who’s a good wrestler but even better at talking trash in the pre-match interview.

Kevin confides in his new girlfriend, Pam (Lily James), that he believes the Von Erichs are living under a curse. That belief is solidified by the events shown in Durkin’s script, which involve two more brothers — Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), a discus thrower headed to the 1980 Olympics until the boycott of Russia is announced, and youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons), whose talents aren’t in the ring but with a guitar.

Durkin, making only his third feature in 12 years (the first two, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “The Nest,” are brilliant), finds as much tension at home as on the canvas. The brothers scrap and push each other, each one seeking to outdo each other for Fritz’s approval, which rises and falls on whether they can bring home the belt. Meanwhile, their mother, Doris (Maura Tierney), sternly tries to stay out of the fray — even after tragedies have her worrying about wearing the same black dress to more than one funeral.

There are some powerful performances throughout “The Iron Claw.” Those who haven’t watched Allen in “The Bear” can see his brooding Kerry and understand what the fuss was about. McCallany plays Fritz as a father whose drive for excellence is ripping his family to shreds. And Efron finds the wounded little boy hidden under all those bulging muscles.

Durkin’s style and the strong acting make it even more confounding at the end of “The Iron Claw,” when it’s revealed how basic the story is. It’s like watching a Shakespearean-trained cast perform a Hallmark Christmas romance — so much talent for so little payoff.

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‘The Iron Claw’

★★★

Opens Friday, December 22, in theaters. Rated R for language, suicide, some sexuality and drug use. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'The Boys in the Boat' is a painfully average middle-of-the-road sports drama

Underdog sports movies don’t get more straight-forward than in “The Boys in the Boat,” a true story of strivers battling not only to compete but to beat the many layers of a system stacked against them.

Director George Clooney — who appears in the movie’s ads but not onscreen himself — and screenwriter Mark L. Smith (who wrote Clooney’s “The Midnight Sky”) adapt Daniel James Brown’s book about the real-life 8-man 1936 rowing team of the University of Washington. They were scrappers, battling the rich colleges like Cal and Penn to win the national championship. In 1936, winning the U.S. collegiate title brings a bonus: A chance to compete in the Olympics, in Hitler’s Berlin.

When Joe Rantz (played by Callum Turner) tries out for the junior crew team, he’s not thinking about beating Cal or the Germans. Joe needs a job so he can pay his tuition — and a place to sleep other than an old car in the middle of Seattle’s Hooverville. It’s the middle of the Great Depression, and Joe’s been on his own since was 14. 

It won’t be easy, the crusty coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton), tells the young men trying out. There are more than 100 of them, trying for eight slots on the boat, and the training is grueling. Joe gets encouragement from his friends in training — as well the team’s Yoda-like boat builder, George Pocock (Peter Guinness), and a fetching classmate, Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson). 

Even if you haven’t read Brown’s book, Smith’s script and Clooney’s direction will make you feel like you have — because every step of the Huskies’ crew journey, and Joe’s path to personal success, feels rote and predictable. There’s even a cameo, during the opening ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics as our boys meet track star Jesse Owens (Jyuddah Jaymes), that plays with a slap-your-forehead level of narrative shamelessness.

Still, Clooney captures the technical aspects of rowing, the difficulty and the exhilaration of it, beautifully. And he has a strong ensemble of young actors to play the Washington team — besides Turner (familiar as Newt Scamander’s brother Theseus in the “Fantastic Beasts” films), the standouts are Jack Mulhern as the shy Don Hume, Sam Strike as Joe’s best friend Roger Morris, and Luke Slattery as the borderline-arrogant coxswain Bobby Moch. 

Let me say that, as a Washington alumnus, it pains me to say “The Boys in the Boat” isn’t as good as it could be. It’s got the muscle in the boat. It just doesn’t have the imagination to move it in the right direction.

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‘The Boys in the Boat’

★★1/2

Opens Monday, December 25, Christmas Day. Rated PG-13 for language and smoking. Running time: 124 minutes.

Review: 'Wonka' captures a surprising amount of the magic of Gene Wilder's 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory'

Timothée Chalamet has a big top hat to fill in “Wonka,” an origin story for Roald Dahl’s enigmatic chocolate maker, in which the young star finds the balance between referencing back to the great Gene Wilder’s manic and yearning performance in the 1971 “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and not copying the master too closely.

The movie’s real candy man — the one who mixes it with love and makes the world taste good — is director and screenwriter (with co-writer Simon Farnaby) Paul King, who captures the same smart humor and whimsical world-building he brought to the two “Paddington” movies.

We first see Chalamet’s Willy Wonka arriving by ship to the big city, after sailing the world perfecting his chocolate creations and ready to spend his 12 silver sovereigns establishing himself in the Galerie Gourmet, where all the great chocolatiers go to sell their wares. Alas, on his first night in the city, he is suckered in by two crooks, Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Colman) and Mr. Bleacher (Tom Davis), who get Willy to sign a contract for room and board without reading the fine print.

Soon Willy is stuck with a horrendous debt, which he must work off by washing clothes in Scrubitt & Bleacher’s laundry, along with some of their other victims — including an orphaned girl, named Noodle (Calah Lane), who has been trapped in the laundry since she was a baby.

Willy is convinced that his chocolate will make enough money to pay off not only his debts, but those of Noodle and the others serving in the laundry. Noodle helps him sneak out, so he can return to Galerie Gourmet. Once there, though, he discovers that the chocolate cartel – the big candy barons Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton) — have a death grip on the market, and control the leading cleric, Father Julius (Rowan Atkinson), and the chocoholic chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key). 

Adding to Willy’s problems is the little orange man who’s following him around and trying to steal his chocolates. He’s played, delightfully, by Hugh Grant — and anyone familiar with the Wilder movie knows not only what kind of creature he is, but what song he’s likely to sing.

Yes, there is singing here. “Wonka” is a full-throated musical, with songs written by Neil Hannon (the main creator for the Northern Ireland band The Divine Comedy). Chalamet’s songs are charming, and well-delivered, but the most catchy number comes when the greedy chocolate makers negotiate the price of their bribe to the police chief.

King is clearly inspired by the trippy visuals of Mel Stuart’s 1971 film, but he’s not hemmed in by them. His depiction of the young Wonka’s world is happily energetic, a confection worthy of its main character. He also brings a wry streak of absurd humor, as well as a lot of heart — as Willy thinks back to his mother (Sally Hawkins) and her lessons in the pleasures of chocolate making.

I’ve always thought “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” to be a one-off, a singular pop-art creation that — mainly because of Wilder’s deliriously insane performance — could never be duplicated. But King and Chalet, with “Wonka,” manage toevoke the same sense of playful wonder that its predecessor did. It indeed shines as a good deed in a weary world. 

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‘Wonka’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some violence, mild language and thematic elements. Running time: 116 minutes.

Review: 'Fallen Leaves' is a sparse and biting Finnish romance that earns its emotions

As bracing as a walk outside on a cold Helsinki night — and about as short — Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismäki’s “Fallen Leaves” is a romantic comedy stripped away of unnecessary moments, pretense and false sentimentality. It earns its flowers, and deserves them.

Like any romance, this is the story of two people. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) works in a supermarket, where the security guard (Sakari Kuosmanen) stares her down when she’s taking expired groceries to the rubbish bin, because she gives an item to a beggar before throwing it away. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) works as a welder on a job site, whose employer provides a bunk in a railway car with three other men.

One night, Ansa and her coworker, Liisa (Nuppu Koivu), go to a bar for karaoke night. One of the singers that night is Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen), Holappa’s philosophical roommate, and Holappa is along for moral support. Huotari chats up Liisa after his song, but Holappa is too frozen to talk to Ansa, and vice versa.

Eventually, there is a date — the movie Holappa chooses is Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die” (an inside joke between friends; Jarmusch made a cameo in Kaurismäki’s 1989 movie “Leningrad Cowboys Go America,” and Jarmusch used Kaurismäki’s actors in the Helsinki segment of his 1991 movie “Night on Earth”). She gives her his number, but he quickly drops the paper and it blows away.

That’s the first of many obstacles to Ansa and Holappa’s potential happiness, including job losses, financial struggles and Holappa’s frequent drinking — a dealbreaker for Ansa, who says she watched her father and brother die as a result of alcoholism, and won’t put herself through that again.

Kaurismäki is spare with dialogue, and allows his actors only the faintest of expressions. But within that restraint is a wealth of suppressed heartache, longing and a search to make the lonely nights more bearable. Pöysti and Vatanen fit perfectly in this world, taciturn figures who would explode if forced to express the emotions roiling within them. 

One gets the impression that Kaurismäki would have been at home in the silent movie era (there’s a hint of that idea at the very end). “Fallen Leaves” has the deadpan grace of a Buster Keaton film, and ultimately the battered hopefulness of Charlie Chaplin’s best work. 

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‘Fallen Leaves’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language. Running time: 82 minutes; in Finnish, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Disappearance of Shere Hite' chronicles the sex researcher's career — and how she fell down the memory hole

How exactly did a controversial, charismatic and best-selling sex expert get shoved down the memory hole, to the point where many people today don’t know who she was? That’s the intriguing question director Nicole Newnham poses in the fascinating documentary “The Disappearance of Shere Hite.” 

(Warning: This review, like the movie, uses language about human sexuality that some may find offensive.)

Hite became famous in the mid-1970s for authoring “The Hite Report,” at the time one of the most thorough studies of how women think about sex. Taking thousands of completed surveys from women around the world, Hite and her research team came up with some jaw-dropping data — with the headline being the news that women were far more likely to achieve an orgasm through masturbation than through being penetrated by a man’s penis.

The news was a bombshell. So was Hite, who had a lithe figure and gorgeous strawberry-blonde hair. She used both to get through college, working as a model for advertising and illustrations (she was the model for the buxom babes flanking Sean Connery in the poster for “Diamonds Are Forever”), as well as some tasteful nudes that would come back to haunt her. 

Hite also was politically active, and signed on early with the National Organization for Women. She enlisted her fellow activists to distribute her survey, which asked open-ended questions detailing one’s sexual experience, feelings and preferences. 

Hite also promoted the heck out of “The Hite Report,” making it a best-seller. That’s in spite of efforts by the publisher, the company’s former editor-in-chief tells the filmmakers, to deep-six the book by printing only 4,000 copies on its initial run and not providing any publicity. But Hite, deploying her striking looks and her command of her subject, made numerous TV appearances to talk up her findings.

The uproar over Hite’s first book was nothing compared to what happened with her second book, a survey asking men to talk about their sexual experiences, as well as their feelings. The biggest finding was that the vast majority of men were unhappy in their relationships — but couldn’t say so out loud because of the pressure on men not to show their feelings.

The release of the second “Hite Report” generated some of the most outlandish footage in Newnham’s film. There’s one clip where talk-show host Mike Douglas is asking Hite about her findings, and actor David Hasselhoff makes the mistake of trying to equate Hite’s thousands of survey responses to the anecdotal evidence of some of Hasselhoff’s pals. (There’s a similar clip that “Buck Rogers” star Gil Gerard won’t be happy to see circulating again.)

Newnham — who co-directed the 2020 Sundance doc “Crip Camp” — recounts, among its many stories, how the survey respondents sometimes recorded their answers on cassette tapes. Her team even found cassette tapes some respondents sent, which are now in the hands of the archives of Harvard. And actor Dakota Johnson is heard, reading from Hite’s memoirs, throughout the film.

So how did Shere Hite — who died in September 2020 — go from the most talked-about author in America to a forgotten figure? Blame the backlash against feminism in the 1980s. Blame her own consternation with the media. Or blame, appropriately, the rise of conservatism in the age of Reagan. “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” is a potent reminder that Hite was revealing truths that some didn’t want to hear then or now, truths that are resurfacing to reach a new generation.

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‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, December 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for sexual material, nudity/graphic nudity and some language. Running time: 118 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 23, 2023, when the movie premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.