‘The Color Purple’ review: First-class performers. So why does the musical version feel less authentic than the first film, even?

Like Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film version, the new screen edition of “The Color Purple” feels like a musical, the difference being the new one is a musical.

It’s based on the 2005 Broadway hit, which spun off various tours and a 2015 revival that, like the first Broadway staging, handed its female lead a Tony Award — LaChanze first, Cynthia Erivo second. This new movie stars the powerhouse Fantasia Barrino, who replaced LaChanze as Celie in the original Broadway run.

Barrino portrays the adult Celie, the abused, discarded but finally restored Georgia girl who survives a wrenching separation from her sister and lands on a heart-swelling reunion decades later. As a girl, the character’s played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi. The new film spans 36 years, 1909 to 1945. Both Mpasi and Barrino are wonderful. And they’re surrounded by a cornucopia of triple threats, doing their best to elevate the synthetic fabric of this latest adaptation.

For many, the performers will be more than enough. The Ghanaian director Blitz Bazawule was a smart choice for this screen adaptation; his visual expressivity (see his debut feature “The Burial of Kojo” sometime; it’s a beaut) suits the musical genre well. Setting up, amplifying, finessing the songs and transitions of time and place, Bazawule and his Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen make things flow and shine. It’s not precisely the way Spielberg did nearly 40 years ago, but the movie musical works from a related impulse to beautify and “sell” even the harshest elements of Celie’s life, first imagined in Alice Walker’s spellbinding dream of a 1982 novel. After reading it in college I was never quite the same.

Maybe that’s my problem. I keep hoping for a similarly transporting experience. The disappointing limitation with this new, fabulized “Color Purple,” despite the on-screen talent, is one of intent. Like the ‘85 film, the new one works overtime to turn Walker’s narrative (which always had its share of fable-like elements) into a relatively faithful but also determinedly palatable good time, leaning into the big numbers (a chain gang routine here, a tasty ‘40s-inflected dance showcase there) and cathartic solos and duets for Celie and company.

Make no mistake, it’s still a story grounded in wrenching emotional abandonment and bleak cycles of physical and sexual abuse. But the key, I think, to the novel’s sweeping success was in not playing the ending — the most soothing wish-fulfillment imaginable — from the beginning. It’s nearly impossible not to respond to “The Color Purple” and Celie’s odyssey, in any version. But it’s also possible to wish for a movie that felt more like real life, and real lives, in all their emotional colors, without so much showbiz.

The score didn’t get a lot of critical love on Broadway, but there’s no doubt its blend of blues, swing, soul and Broadway power balladeering feeds a performer’s desire to go to town, and back again, and to town again, and back again. Siedah Garrett, Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray collaborated on some new material, complementing the songs written for Broadway by Russell, Bray and the late Allee Willis.

The new film also interpolates the Quincy Jones / Rod Temperton / Lionel Richie tune from the ‘85 film, “Miss Celie’s Blues” (aka “Sister”). This gives Taraji P. Henson’s Shug Avery not just an entrance but the entrance: a Ziegfeld-worthy floating-atop-the-swamp glide to Harpo’s Juke Joint, the club run by Harpo (Corey Hawkins), sometime boyfriend of the formidable Sofia (Danielle Brooks) when he’s with Squeak (played by H.E.R.).

Harpo’s place is where so many of the characters converge, surrounded by temptation and drink and memories. The superb Colman Domingo, as the brutal abuser Mister, takes one look at Shug and sees what he likes; Shug, meantime, takes one look at Celie and sees what needs salvation, sexual as well as spiritual. So, about that: The Spielberg film took a lot of deserved heat for downplaying, practically erasing the lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug.

The stage musical didn’t go there, either. If anything, director Bazawule’s Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptation, working from a script by Marcus Gardley, is even touchier than Spielberg regarding this perceived third rail of trouble. And without Celie’s sexual life acknowledged more fully, the flamboyance and carefully engineered catharsis feels a little dodgy.

In the Spielberg version, as Whoopi Goldberg recalled in a 2018 interview, “nobody was going to let me and Shug make out. They just weren’t.” In 2023 they still aren’t. A nervous, middle-of-the-road approach to “The Color Purple” (”bold caution,” as the lines from “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” put it) may equal fewer offended parties and better box office. But it’s chicken-hearted, and both Alice Walker and her latest interpreters deserve more of the story.

“The Color Purple” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for mature thematic content, sexual content, violence and language)

Running time: 2:21

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Dec. 25

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune