Not long after Prince died, I was participating the Gabbing Geek podcast/blabcast and, well, had nothing to say on the subject of Prince’s death. Fortunately, no one seemed to notice and others filled the void. As I have explained many times over the years, I have tinnitus in one ear due to a childhood infection. The constant ringing means I have difficulty hearing. As such, I can honestly say I have never really gotten much into popular music. It is therefore probably a good thing that no one asked me for my Prince memories because aside from a sketch on Chappelle’s Show and the soundtrack for Tim Burton’s Batman, I wasn’t sure I even knew all that much about him or his music.
As it is, his semi-autobiographical, R-rated musical Purple Rain was leaving HBO Max at the end of the month, and between that and Prince’s prominence in the not-very-good book Ready Player Two, I figured now was as good a time as any to catch up a bit.
Purple Rain‘s plot, such as it is, follows the Kid (Prince) as he sings to packed crowds at a popular club by night with his band the Revolution, romances newcomer Apollonia (Apollonia Kotero) by day, and deals with an abusive father (Clarence Williams III) attacking his mother (Olga Karlatos) at home. He has career ups and downs, particularly involving rival Morris (Morris Day) and the fact that two women in his band write music they want him to listen to. He struggles creatively and personally, and then at the end he wins over everyone with the title song. There’s not much to it, with much of the drama kicking in over the Kid’s problems at home where his musically talented father takes out his frustrations on his family.
Now, to be very fair, the music in the movie is good stuff. I may have recognized a bit here and there, and Prince knew how to write and perform music, so there’s a lot there to like. And as much as this may be a “musical,” it is a musical in the same sense that most musical biopics are musicals where the songs are a form of performance by Prince or Kotero or Day. I would not presume to judge Prince’s music. It’s good stuff, and I never know what to say about music beyond whether or not I like it.
However, I am not much of a Prince fan, so I am instead going to judge this movie as a movie and not by how good Prince’s songs are. And as a movie, honestly, this didn’t do much for me. I think it says something where most of the main characters are essentially playing themselves. Aside from the Kid’s parents, it does appear everyone is playing a fictionalized version of him or herself, and none of these people, Prince included, are exactly going to win any acting awards. Much of the movie seems to be set up to make Prince look as cool as possible with his motorcycle and exuberant crowds while Morris comes across as a lesser rival. If anything, it does suggest that a good song can somehow solve all of a person’s problems.
And therein lay the biggest problem for me watching this movie in 2021: this movie is incredibly forgiving towards domestic abusers. The Kid’s father hits the Kid’s mother, causing her to flee the house at one point, and we are meant to see him as the victim as an extremely frustrated musician. In fact, it is the reveal that he is a frustrated musician that wins his son over to his side, and the movie ends after a failed suicide attempt with the Kid’s mother laying her head in sorrow and hope across her abusive husband’s stomach as he lies in a hospital bed. Likewise, the Kid strikes Apollonia a couple times, but he doesn’t really seem to apologize except, again, through a rocking song at the end, and this comes after he’s humiliated her with a different song. Did he learn a lesson? I am actually inclined to think he didn’t and got off rather easily, all told. I realize, in the case of the Kid’s parents, that the situation is probably realistically a more emotionally complicated affair than we have been led to believe, but the whole thing left me feeling a bit cold towards the movie’s protagonist. I don’t think any song sung to a packed house is quite the way to get back in any woman’s good graces after what had come before, but that’s just me.
Still, the music was great.
Grade: C+
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