The Color Purple and Wonka

 

Blitz Bazawule's The Color Purple and Paul King's Wonka are quite different in story and tone but they are both decidedly Hollywood Holiday fare, packing sumptuous visuals and ear-pleasing tunes while approaching their themes of family, lost and found, from different directions.

Bazawule's adaptation of the award-winning Broadway musical is dazzling and stirring but also quite different in thrust and focus from Steven Spielberg's first film adaptation in 1985, which starred Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey (her first movie role). Both the '85 and the latest production capture accurately the brutality of Alice Walker's novel but the musical emphasizes to a greater degree the women's response to their harsh treatment at the hands of their fathers and husbands and their roles as healers and redeemers not only of themselves but of the men in their lives, most menacingly Mister (Colman Domingo).

Empowerment and the trappings that come with it run through this picture that stars an essentially all-Black cast. Fantasia Barrino's Celie is the focus of a sisterhood intervention marshaled by Taraji P. Henson's blues chanteuse Shug Avery and Danielle Brooks' fiercely defiant Sofia. All three ladies are wonderful and fill the screen with powerful voices, even if the acting, in places is not as strong. But where God's mercy and deliverance were essentially absent from the earlier dramatic film, the musical uses the gospel roots of its showstoppers to not only raise the rafters but the audience's hands in praise.

King's Wonka is a sort of prequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) that rises above the controversy around Roald Dahl's original story as being marred by subtly racist conceits with diverse and international casting and a universal story of pursuing elusive dreams.

Despite nimble choreography and fanciful confectionary scenes, Wonka doesn't stick the landing with hummable songs. It might be too early to fairly make that observation, but I can't imagine any of the dozen perfectly lovely numbers sung by Timothée Chalamet (who has a fine but not particularly strong voice) and the cast (principally Calah Lane as Noodle) will challenge The Candy Man or Pure Imagination from the original picture. In fact, the latter number, given a warm reprise near the end of Wonka will surely pull the tears where other numbers didn't.

But, again, King puts all of the wonderful casting and perfectly listenable though not particularly memorable songs to the purpose of exploring the meaning of family, of detachment and of the search for "mother," both literally and figuratively.

Both Celie Johnson and Willy Wonka -- while fictitious creations -- present to movie audiences very different faces of a common real-world longing for connection with that which gives life meaning and purpose. Celie finally discovers she was loved by her mother and is reunited with her beloved sister and children. Willy finally understands a lesson from his long-absent mother that life, like chocolate, is enjoyed best when it is shared.

Terrific messages for this season.