Tag: Danny Glover

The Color Purple (1985)

Spielberg’s film has many strengths but is a little too sentimental and can’t always grasp everyday horror

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Whoopi Goldberg (Celie Harris-Johnson), Danny Glover (Albert Johnson), Adolph Caesar (Ol’ Mister Johnson), Margaret Avery (Shug Avery), Rae Dawn Chong (Mary ‘Squeak’ Agnes), Oprah Winfrey (Sofia), Akosua Busia (Nettie Harris), Willard Pugh (Harpo Johnson), Dana Ivey (Miss Millie), Desreta Jackson (Young Celie)

The Color Purple was Spielberg’s first foray into making ‘grown-up’ movies. He still seems like an odd choice for it today: author Alicia Walker was very hesitant, until ET proved to her Spielberg could make a film with empathy for a minority outsider. Producer and composer Quincy Jones actively courted Spielberg for the role – after all, this was a period where a mainstream film about the lives of Black people was rarely made without a white POV character (effectively, Spielberg filled that role instead). The Color Purple has several things about it that are hugely effective: but I found it much less moving than many others have. It feels like a film trying too hard, pushing its beats too firmly, sometimes timid and (interestingly) struggling to grasp the horror of relentless, everyday cruelty with the same understanding it gives explosive, violence.

Adapted from Walker’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel, it follows the life of Celie (Whoopi Goldberg) in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The victim of sexual abuse from her father (with whom she has two children, taken from her at birth) she is effectively sold to Mister Johnson (Danny Glover), a terminally inadequate man who violently takes out his frustrations on her. Forcibly separated from her beloved sister Nettie (Akosua Busia), Celie waits for years until she finds closeness with her husband’s lover, singer Shug Avery (Margaret Avery). Meanwhile, her adopted wider family encounter tragedy of their own, not least Sofia (Oprah Winfrey) the strong-willed wife of Johnson’s son Harpo (Willard Pugh) who unjustly finds herself persecuted by the law.

You can’t doubt the passion that’s gone into making The Color Purple. There is much to admire in it, not least the richness of its photography. Several sequences are profoundly affecting. The film constantly places Celie in a vulnerable position – the film’s opening constantly frames Celie and her husband together to stress his height and strength and to accentuate her vulnerability. This slowly inverts in the film as Celie starts to find a strength of character and independence. But the heightened trauma of her forced separation from her sister and the violence her husband is capable of is hard-to-watch.

It also works thanks to a subtle, low-key and tender performance from Whoopi Goldberg as Celie. With impressive restraint, Goldberg creates a woman beaten down by relentless misery who, for years, not only accepts domestic violence as something she deserves but as a regular part of the world (she even advises Harpo that he should exert control over Sofie with his fists). It’s genuinely affecting when, after over an hour, Goldberg finally smiles and begins to flourish as someone takes notice of her for who she is in her friendship with Shug. When years of pent-up fear and anger finally burst out of Celie, Goldberg really sells this cathartic moment that hits home all the more because of her quiet reserve of her performance.

In fact, the film is awash with fine performances. Danny Glover is very good as the weak-willed Mister Johnson, exerting the only power he has (domestic) with brutal force but treating others around him either with love-struck awe (Shug) or deferential fear (his father). Oprah Winfrey is excellent as a strong-willed, independent woman whose force-of-nature personality protects her at home but condemns her in a wider world that still revolves around racism. Margaret Avery carefully develops a woman who at first feels arrogant and self-absorbed into one revealed to be full of humanity (indeed it’s hard to understand what she ever saw in the pathetic Johnson). Adolph Caesar suggests sadism behind every sneer and muttered line as Mister Johnson’s appalling father.

These performances elevate a film that gets a lot right. The Color Purple understands how ashamed the abused can feel: from the guilt Celie feels at her father’s sexual abuse to the cowed, hollow person who feels she is ugly and worthless after years of oppression. It successfully displays a world where women are commodities, bought and sold by fathers and husbands with no say in their own lives. In this male-dominated world, Mr Johnson effectively rules his household like a plantation, treating his wife and children as he pleases. The camera doesn’t flinch when punches lash out.

But The Color Purple is also a sentimental film. Quincy Jones’ overly-empathetic score rings out over every scene, constantly telegraphic what we are meant to be feeling, choking the action. Some moments of humour land: a running-joke about the hapless Harpo falling through the roofs he tries to repair or Mr Johnson’s failed attempt to cook breakfast for Shug (and her furious rejection of this burnt slop) is refreshing. But the faint comic air given to Sofie’s post-jail employer Miss Milley, most crucially at her panic at the prospect of driving herself home alone leading her to insist Sofie breaks off re-uniting with her children after years of separation to take her home, works less well.

What’s fascinating about The Color Purple is that Spielberg, too me, can’t quite fully grasp casual everyday cruelty. Those petty acts of selfish cruelty, and the constant, demeaning talking-down and psychological cruelty of belittling people everyday. There is something about this relentless, unseen, low-key, damaging abuse that’s a little outside his world view. He understands the drama of slaps, punches and rapes but the everyday grind of an abusive partner effectively telling you every day you’re stupid and worthless is something the film can’t grasp (interestingly, the closest it can get to it is in trauma Johnson’s father has given his son). Tiny, reflexive, almost casual acts of cruelty and power play don’t quite land (in many ways, Johnson sleeping through his son’s wedding, is an act of cruel dominance not a gag) in the ways the violence does.

There has been criticism that a Black director should have taken on the project (and that’s fair) but really, I feel what this needs is a female director. Someone who could appreciate, in a way I don’t feel Spielberg quite can, the powerlessness of being a real outsider in a male-controlled world, constantly in danger. Because, in many ways, that constant disparagement is what has crushed Celine, even more than her husband’s fists. Instead the film is more comfortable with highlight moments of oppression, rather than continual misery. It can ‘t deliver on the grim grind of many years, it prefers the key moments that have immediate impact but lack the mortar binding them together.

It’s not the only part of the film where Spielberg blinks. The novel’s sexuality is stripped out, the romantic relationship between Shug and Celine almost completely ejected (you can feel the film’s discomfort whenever sex rears its head – Spielberg has never filmed sex with anything other than awkward embarrassment). It’s a loss of nerve Spielberg has acknowledged, in a film which leans hard into a sentimental and ‘all problems solved’ ending (that even gives a level of redemption to Mr Johnson that the novel avoided).

That’s the flaw with The Color Purple. There is something too well-planned and careful about it, a film building towards key points but which does that at the cost of a lot of the truth that underpins its characters. In the end it offers easier, more digestible versions of every theme it covers. It’s acting and filming is frequently first-class, but as a result I found it far less moving than I feel it should be.

Places in the Heart (1984)

Overcoming adversity and racism are themes not always successfully balanced in Benton’s family epic

Director: Robert Benton

Cast: Sally Field (Edna Spalding), Lindsay Crouse (Margaret Lomax), Danny Glover (Moze Hardner), John Malkovich (Mr Will), Ed Harris (Wayne Lomax), Amy Madign (Viola Kelsey), Yankton Hatten (Frank Spalding), Gennie James (Possum Spalding), Lane Smith (Albert Denby), Ray Baker (Sheriff Royce Spalding), Terry O’Quinn (Buddy Kelsey), De’voreaux White (Wylie)

Partially based on his own childhood memories, set in Texas 1935 as the Depression grips America, Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart is a tear-jerking tale of overcoming adversity, mixed with an earnest attempt to look at Southern racism. It’s often a little heavy-handed in the former, and a little fudged (if very well-meaning) in the second. Places in the Heart is a frustrating film with a genuinely engaging, engrossing story that, for various reasons, the film never manages to quite bring into focus, for all the undoubted skill in its making.

Sally Field plays Edna Spalding, a widow after her sheriff husband (Ray Baker) is accidentally shot and killed by a drunken Black teenager (promptly brutally lynched by the Klan the same day). With the bank pushing to foreclose on the farm she can no longer afford, poverty and homelessness seem certain until a chance meeting with Black drifter Moze (Danny Glover) offers hope. Moze is an experienced cotton worker, and he coaches Edna through getting the fastest cotton crop of the season (and the $100 prize for that feat). Edna and her children throw themselves into the task, and she starts to build a new family with Moze and blind war-veteran lodger Mr Will (John Malkovich). But will weather, the Klan and the banks allow it?

Benton’s film is, in many ways, a master-class in constructing a framework of highly impactful scenes. Places in the Heart is carefully paced with metronomic precision to give us an impactful, powerful scene roughly every ten minutes. From the shockingly sudden shooting of Sheriff Spalding and Edna cleaning his deceased body on her dining room table it gives us scenes that build perfectly to showcase high impact moments. Confrontations, tornadoes that place children in peril, triumphant confrontations with arrogant bankers and facing down corrupt cotton sellers, inevitable fireworks after a disastrous double date and heart-rending racist attacks. It’s a film almost completely constructed of tent-pole moments, to illicit maximum impact.

However, where it fails are the moments in-between. It’s so focused on nailing those big moments, that it allows the emotional journey that should inter-connect them (and make the story truly satisfying) to falter. The clearest example is Malkovich’s blind Mr Will: in no more than three scenes he goes from a man bitter at his disability, dumped on Mrs Spalding by a family who can’t be bothered to care for him, resenting her ‘hooligan’ children to risking his life to becoming their surrogate uncle. It’s a tribute to Malkovich that he sells this lightning fast emotional turn-around, but a more patient film would have spent this change feel organic (rather than, essentially, relying on a tornado act-of-God to complete the arc).

Similarly lightning fast work covers the bond between Edna and Moze: swiftly we go a few scenes from her greeting him with slightly less racist discomfort than her sister, to Jean-Valjean-like claiming she asked him to deliver to a friend the silver spoons he steals from her house, to him becoming another surrogate uncle to the kids and treated in the house like an equal (he notably doesn’t cross the door threshold for the first hour of the film). Now you can admire the efficiency here – for example, the film is good at establishing without fanfare the rope aids hung up around the farm to help Mr Will (vital for a later confrontation). But you can also regret that it is so keen to get to the emotionally cathartic moments, it skims on showing us the journey (after all, a one hundred mile walk seems less impressive if you only see the start and end).

Part of the problem is Benton keeps dragging us away from these engaging plotlines to wallow in a side-plot involving Mrs Spalding’s sister and her wayward husband’s affair with a school teacher. This storyline barely intersects with events on the Spalding farm, in no way serves as a commentary on events there (a braver film would have contrasted it with a romantic relationship between Edna and Moze, which you can be sure would not have been as genteelly resolved as that affair in a South as racist as this). All it really does – for all the efforts of Crouse (Oscar-nominated, presumably due to her husband-slapping confrontation scene), Harris and Madigan, it’s meandering, dull and feels pointless even while you are watching it.

And it always takes us away from the real interest on the farm. The depiction of triumph over adversity is fairly straight-forward – with a host of hissable strawmen, led by Lane Smith’s patronisingly sexist banker – but it’s told with such professional skill it can’t help but land. Who doesn’t enjoy a woman who never believed she amounted to anything, suddenly discovering an inner-fire and sense of purpose she never knew. You may notice the similarity to Sally Field’s other Oscar-winning role (Norma Rae). Her performance here is cut from the same cloth, only this time she can’t find the same naturalness: she is frequently mannered, precise and actorly when she should feel raw, grounded and real.

The real daring interest here is the way the film tries to address racism. You can’t deny there is a certain romanticism in its looks at the Ol’ South, but its balanced with putting on screen something of the real horrors of racism. Perhaps even more shocking than the sudden shooting of Sheriff Spalding is the sight of young Wylie’s disfigured body dragged behind a truck full of gun-totting racists. (And that this is objected to, not for the violence, but for the poor taste of dragging a dead man to Spalding’s wake). Needless to say there is no investigation or punishment for this crime whatsoever.

Moze’s story captures some of the perils of being Black in Depression-era Texas. Danny Glover, in the film’s finest performance, perfectly captures both the anger of the unjustly oppressed and the fear (and shame of that fear) that death could come from the wrong word or looking at someone the wrong way. Moze constantly shuffles himself to the back, casting his-eyes down and changing the timbre of his voice to something slower and more humble when confronted with white men of power. It’s markedly different from the warmth, decency and sharp opinions he shows with people he trusts. And Places in the Heart’s most appalling moment is when he is confronted with the white-hooded face of the South’s ‘defenders’.

At times this sometimes over-balances a film that, at heart, wants to be optimistic. (As you can tell, all too clearly, from its bizarre, overly demonstrative, deliberately dream-like ‘we-can-all-be-the-same’ ending which must have felt meaningful to Benton but to me feels shockingly trite). Moze’s suffering is shown with real compassion, but he is still presented as a character who magically shows up at exactly the time he is needed and then disappears when his task is done. It’s a film that imagines a utopia where a desperate mother, a blind white man and a Black man can learn all men are equal, while struggling to accept that this is nestled in a land riddled with Klan racists where the n-word is so casually used it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. In the end cold, hard reality is a little too much for Places in the Heart to digest.

Witness (1985)

Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis have a cautious romance across the divide in Peter Weir’s gripping thriller Witness

Director: Peter Weir

Cast: Harrison Ford (Detective John Book), Kelly McGillis (Rachel Lapp), Lukas Haas (Samuel Lapp), Jan Rubes (Eli Lapp), Josef Summer (Chief Paul Schaeffer), Alexander Gudunov (Daniel Hochleitner), Danny Glover (Lt James McFee), Brent Jennings (Sgt Elton Carter), Patti LuPone (Elaine), Angus MacInnes (Dgt Leon Ferguson), Viggo Mortensen (Moses Hochleitner)

The old world meets the new, when a mother and son from an Amish community find themselves travelling through Philadelphia and the son is the only witness to a murder at the train station. The mother, Rachel (Kelly McGillis) wants to help, but is worried about her son Samuel’s (Lukas Haas) safety and is desperate to return home – after all these ‘English’ problems aren’t theirs. However, Detective John Book’s (Harrison Ford) investigation reveals the murder to be the work of dirty cops in his own department – and, after an attempt on his life, he has no choice but to flee back to Amish community with Rachel and son, hiding until he can find a way to set things right.

Directed by Peter Weir with a real professional smoothness, Witness is a triumph of atmosphere and mood, with an intriguing thriller at the heart of it. Weir brings a real understanding and respect for different ways of life, embracing the differences in the Amish way of life but also making some striking parallels between it and our modern world. It’s that emotional maturity and sensitivity that makes the film work: and the most impactful factor is the heartfelt, largely unspoken romance between Book and Rachel. Weir keeps this subtle, gentle and built on suppressed feelings and wordless moments that trusts the audience to understand their bond and their knowledge that their different worlds mean they can probably never be together.

Weir directs these moments with a real romantic simplicity, drawing possibly the most heartfelt, almost boyish, performance he’s ever given from Harrison Ford. Oscar-nominated (his only nomination), Witness is a reminder of how well Ford does both moral outrage and pained suffering. His fury at his corrupt colleagues betraying their badge is as visceral as his sense of fear when he’s chased (first in a car park, then later around an Amish farm) by Danny Glover’s heavy – we always feel worried about Ford’s safety, while also sure he can look after himself. He also works wonderfully with Lukas Haas, Weir focusing on his under-valued fatherly qualities as an actor.

Ford brilliantly combines his decency and world-weary sadness (few actors manage to look more outraged but also resigned when confronted with betrayal and villainy – and is there a more decent, homespun name than John Book?) but Witness taps into his vulnerability more than almost any other film. That’s not just physical vulnerability – he spends a large portion of the film recovering from a gunshot and looks genuinely in fear of his life in the final confrontation – but also emotionally vulnerable.

In a luscious scene he and Rachel (an equally superb performance from Kelly McGillis) dance in a barn to What a Wonderful World by Sam Cooke. As the two shyly and slightly hesitantly exchange looks, both actors allow their characters to hang on the edge of making a clear romantic gesture, but always backing away with laughs and grins. Ford has never seemed more playful, joyfully singing along while McGillis’ emotional frankness and honesty leads makes the scene beautifully romantic, with two people nervous about admitting their growing feelings for each other.

This is just one of several romantic touches that really carry impact. From the moment they arrive in the Amish village, they find themselves drawn to each other. Maybe it’s the charmingly awkward way Book wears the Amish clothes that don’t fit him. Perhaps is the delighted smile and the realisation of her own loneliness in Rachel . But the feelings are unspoken but clear. Both of them are tentative about romance. Book is passionate about justice but surprisingly shy personally (as is all too clear from his bashful talk with his sister earlier). Rachel is committed to her religion, but also yearns for something emotionally beyond what that community can give her (certainly she’s unthrilled by the expectation that she will marry Alexander Gudunov’s Amish farmer, who courts her with a pleasant but romance free dutifulness). Interestingly she is the one more forward in what she wants than Book. For all the film is a gripping thriller, this romantic story is its heart and what gives the film its impact.

The film also works because Weir treats the Amish life so matter-of-factly. The opening moments of the scene, in its simple rural setting and accompanying choral-inspired score could be set hundreds of years ago. It’s actually quite jarring when we find ourselves in busy Philadelphia: but Weir never suggests either way of life is superior to the other. Both are communities with their own rules, virtues and flaws. The Amish are peaceful, but just as capable of prejudice as anyone else. But they are free of the cruelty and violence of the modern world.

A large chunk of the film follows Book’s fish-out-of-water experiences with the Amish, and his growing regard for them reflects the film’s own feelings. He finds there’s a strange peace in the community – and we can see why after we’ve seen the hard-bitten streets Book works. Ford’s real-life carpentry skills have never been used better on film, as Book helps raise a barn (a lovely moment of communal accomplishment). But while the peace is refreshing, he can only change so much. Confronting abusive townspeople (“It’s not our way”/”It’s my way”), Book strikes back. The film’s stance on Book’s smacking down of these abusive street kids is an insight into its maturity: it’s a brief moment of triumph, but is soured instantly by the horror of his hosts – and leads directly into blowing Book’s cover.

But it works because it reflects how we are feeling. Having been led to invest so heavily in a way of life it’s easy to joke about, we feel the same as Book does: those bullies need taking down a peg or two. It fits with Book’s character as well – the idea of corrupt, bullying cops is as repugnant to him as drunken oaths mocking those who choose not to defend themselves.

Weir’s film also successfully creates plenty of thriller beats. Little Samuel’s witnessing of a murder in a train station toilet has a seedy immediacy and sense of danger that really makes you fear for the kid’s safety (and admire his life-saving ingenuity). There’s also rather nicely a simplicity to the film – it’s no whodunnit, we more or less have every question answered in the first half hour. Instead, the suspense comes from if Book can live long enough to hand out justice and how he can possibly manage that from an Amish village.

But Witness’s heart is the relationship between Book and Rachael, wonderfully bought to life by Ford and McGillis. Few thrillers would dare to be as soft and sensitive as this film – or have such restraint. It’s tinged throughout by the careful creation of two worlds that mutually co-exist, but never together. It’s open about the virtues and flaws of Amish life, but offers no judgement on either them or their religion, only acceptance of difference. Witness is a thriller with a heart, combining excitement with moments of heart-rending romance. Professional Hollywood working at its best.

The Prince of Egypt (1998)

Animated DeMille epics in the rather brilliant The Prince of Egypt

Director: Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells

Cast: Val Kilmer (Moses), Ralph Fiennes (Ramesses II), Michelle Pfeiffer (Tzipporah), Sandra Bullock (Miriam), Jeff Goldblum (Aaron), Danny Glover (Jethro), Patrick Stewart (Pharaoh Seti), Helen Mirren (Queen Tuya), Steve Martin (Hotep), Martin Short (Huy), Ofra Haza (Yocheved)

When Dreamworks Studio was put together by three Hollywood mega hotshots (Katzenberg, Spielberg and David Geffen), Jeffrey Katzenberg, former head of Disney, finally got the chance to make his animated version of The Ten Commandments. The Prince of Egypt was the first project under the Dreamworks animation label – and it was intended to beat Disney at its own game. It succeeded – so well that many people think it actually is a Disney film. Is that a good thing?

Anyway, the story should be familiar. In Ancient Egypt, Moses (Val Kilmer), the child of Jewish slaves, is adopted by Pharaoh (Patrick Stewart) as a baby after being found in the bulrushes. Moses grows up as brother to Ramesses (Ralph Fiennes) the future Pharaoh – until the shock of finding out his heritage leads him to flee Egypt. But an encounter with the burning bush (voiced again by Kilmer) gives him a new mission – back to Egypt to demand of Ramesses “Let My People Go”. Will he succeed? Well: There Can Be Miracles (When You Believe).

It helps you to believe in miracles when a film looks as gorgeous as this one does. The animation is amazing, not just because of its quality and richness, but the imagination of its images. From the framing of Pharaoh and later Rameses around the Egyptian architecture around them, to an extraordinary dynamic shot of Moses throwing his sandals from the room when encountering the burning bush, to the haunting interpretation of the killing of the firstborn, it’s brilliant.

It doesn’t stop there either, with the final parting of the Red Sea awe-inspiring in its scale. But the film does equally beautiful work with the smaller, more intimate moments: each character feels real and lived in, and the film perfectly captures smaller moments of affection, love and hurt with genuine emotional force. It’s a terrifically well-made film.

And of course it has a classic story – it’s literally stood the test of time. So imaginative are the visuals – and so impressive is its scope and scale – that it almost dwarfs the DeMille style it’s quietly apeing. In fact, I’d worry whether it is a film that will have greater appeal to movie-lovers and parents than perhaps it does to children. There isn’t much in the way of humour – even the film’s nominal comic characters, a pair of cynical Egyptian priests (and near con artists) voiced by Steve Martin and Martin Short, are on the side of the oppressive baddies. There are a few decent songs in there – I rather like the Les Miserables style oomph of “Deliver Us” – and the film makes great use of the beautiful voice of the late Israeli singer Ofra Haza. But there is no getting around that this is a serious piece of film-making, with nary a comic camel in sight.

But this is no bad thing at all, and I think it stands The Prince of Egypt in good stead as it’s a film you’ll like more the older and more mature you are watching it. Not least the wonderfully complex relationship it explores between Moses and Ramesses – these two wild young men start as carefree kids (the first thing we see them do is smash up a temple building site in the film’s most cartoonish sequence, a sort of Wacky Races chariot drag race), and each become dramatically changed by responsibilities. Moses ascends to a higher plane of responsibility and humanity – but Ramesses finds himself forced into defending to the death a system of government he seemed at best disinterested in as a young man.

The film actually carries a great deal of sympathy for Ramesses. It’s in many ways a tragedy of the brother relationship between these two princes of Egypt getting shattered by events. But Ramesses is a lonely, almost needy figure, who needs Moses’ affection and respect. Ralph Fiennes mines a lot of vulnerability for this man struggling to fill his father’s shoes, who just wants Moses to chuck this whole prophet business in and go back to being his only friend. Ramesses becomes a complex, vulnerable and rather sad man – unable to deal with the pressure of his role and desperate to revitalise a lost connection with Moses, the hatred he eventually feels for his former brother born almost exclusively from rejection.

Moses isn’t quite as interesting a character – he’s more of a waster who becomes a stand-up guy – but the film successfully builds an aura about him. It struggles a bit more with those Old Testament morals: we are meant to condemn Pharaoh’s slaughter of the Jewish firstborn that opens the film, but God’s massacring of the the Egyptian firstborn (for all Moses’ discomfort with it) is presented as being primarily the fault of the Egyptians’ stubbornness.

But then that steers us into theological territory, which no animated epic for kids can really manage to set new ground with. Instead, let’s focus on the many things the film does right. First and foremost that striking visual imagery and beautiful animation, and the depth and shading it gives to the characters. The all-star cast do extremely well – even Jeff Goldblum is fairly restrained – and it’s got some great songs. It deserves to be shown as often as The Ten Commandments on the television.