A new tint of 'The Color Purple' comes to the screen, more tuneful and unbound

There's a dazzling moment in the new "The Color Purple" (in theaters Dec. 25) in which Fantasia Barrino sings while walking atop an enormous shellac record spinning on a huge gramophone, all while rotating around Taraji P. Henson soaking in a bathtub.

Maybe that seems incongruent with Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which recounts the abuse and ascendancy of Celie, a poor Black woman living in the rural South in the early 1900s. But this visual — a blink-and-you'll-miss-it image in the trailer for the Warner Bros. release — is emblematic of a relatively psychologically unencumbered approach to the revered story that, though already adapted into an Oscar-nominated film and a crowd-pleasing Broadway musical, had yet to reveal its depths.

"I didn't see why it needed to be remade — that was just my honest