BELOVED
Review by Victory A. Marasigan http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~vmaras1/reviewsidx.html
Jonathan Demme's _Beloved_, based on the book Toni Morrison, is a study in skillful literary adaptation. On the one hand, the film manages to recreate key moments from the novel, evoking Morrison's pragmatic narrative style without using her authorial voice. On the other hand, Beloved omits the some of the finer details of the book, favoring an ambiguously defined back story upon which to build the story's main events. This choice is a smartly made one, for it creates an open space in which the story's wide range of emotions can gestate and grow. Indeed, the impact of the film is so protracted that much of it cannot be felt until long after the end credits have rolled.
_Beloved_ takes place in the second half of the 19th century, during the so-called Reconstruction Era after the Civil War. For newly-freed slaves, it is a time of confusion and turmoil. Oprah Winfrey is Sethe, a slave who escaped a Kentucky plantation and took her children to an Ohio farmhouse, where she hoped the terror would end. What she did not know was that it would follow her there, and remain with her long after the physical threat had vanished. _Beloved_ ultimately tells the story of Sethe's search for forgiveness, one long-hampered by an unforgettable sin.
The film starts off on a dreary day ten years after Sethe's escape, as a violent, unseen energy rocks her dilapidated farmhouse. Invisible hands terrorize her family, flinging objects across rooms, shaking tables, rattling floorboards. Sethe's sons run away, perhaps for good, leaving Sethe and her daughter Denver to fend for themselves.
Demme's matter-of-fact handling of this supernatural element is just one of _Beloved_'s intriguing aspects. All of the characters take for granted that ghosts are real. When Paul D (Danny Glover) -- a former slave who escaped Kentucky along with Sethe -- arrives at the house eight years later and is confronted with the ghost's hellish visions, he doesn't run in terror. Instead, he asks who the ghost is. As in Morrison's novel, Demme quickly establishes that the horror of the story will not come from the fact of the ghost itself, but from the terrifying past in which the ghost was created. Sethe is the one being haunted, but the ghost in the house is the least of her fears. In fact, the ghost is one of the reasons she chooses to stay.
The story takes an bizarre turn with the appearance of Beloved (Thandie Newton), a young black-clad woman who appears on Sethe's front lawn, leaned Christ-like against a tree stump. Sethe and Denver immediately take to the rasping woman and try to nurse her to health. They know not who she is, but that doesn't matter. Only Paul D is suspicious of the stranger. Little does the family know that Beloved will bring about many changes, and force Sethe to release a guilt she has held onto so urgently for eighteen years.
Winfrey is arguably Beloved's greatest asset. She inhabits the role of Sethe so convincingly it is hard to believe this is the same woman who shines brightly on a TV talk show. Lisa Gay Hamilton does an impressive job in the emotionally demanding role as the younger Sethe, whose appalling actions make her the disturbed woman we see eighteen years later. Danny Glover is affable as the sympathetic Paul D, as is Kimberly Elise as Denver, Sethe's wanderlusting daughter. As Sethe's sage-like mother-in-law Old Baby Suggs, Beah Richards authoritatively commands every scene in which she appears.
The film's least palatable choice of casting is unfortunately that of the role of Beloved herself. Thandie Newton plays the glassy-eyed girl with a demented fervor which is endearing at first, but which becomes off-putting and unintentionally laughable by the end.
Departing from the honed aesthetic he used in such films as _The Silence of the Lambs_ and _Melvin & Howard_, director Demme has used a bit of dramatic overstatement to get across the vivid descriptions in Morrison's novel. Totemic camera shots and color-saturated scenery are decidedly uncommon in Demme's films, but the few he uses here work to the film's benefit. _Beloved_'s most memorable scenes are those of Baby Suggs' gatherings in a forest clearing, where the bright yellow-greens of nature entrance the viewer as much as Suggs' words do.
For the most part, though, Demme maintains his trademark directorial neutrality. This, combined with Morrison's equally frugal method of storytelling, may make _Beloved_ somewhat of a challenge to watch, even to those familiar with the book. Though the film compliments the book extraordinarily well, it falls short in allowing the sort of accessibility one usually expects from a film. Nothing is spoon-fed to the viewer. Morrison's novel is just as enigmatic, but unlike a movie, a book can be put down to allow the various undercurrents and themes to churn and absorb.
The movie begins like _Poltergeist_, and ends like _The Color Purple_, with shades of _The Scarlet Letter_ and _Little Women_ somewhere in the middle. Taken as a whole, Beloved is a disquieting, one-of-a-kind experience, one to be viewed with guards down and spirits in abeyance.
GRADE: B+
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