BELOVED Cast: Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, Beah Richards, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Albert Hall, Irma P. Hall Director: Jonathan Demme Screenplay: Adam Brooks, Akosua Busia, Richard LaGravenese based on the novel by Toni Morrison Australian theatrical release: May 6, 1999 Reviewed by Luke Buckmaster
On the Buckmaster scale of 0 stars (bomb), to 5 stars (a masterpiece): 2 and a half stars
To its credit, Beloved is not a conventional period piece. In fact, there is really nothing ordinary in the themes that are explored in this film. Oprah Winfrey's labor of love that she nurtured for over a decade is a peculiar and often unsettling mixture of horror and drama. The film succeeds in crafting extraordinary characters and moments, but with an almost three-hour running time one might question the existence of an editor. It's difficult to put a finger on what director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) and the screenwriters are trying to tell us, not because it is something incredibly profound, but rather because there are too many subplots that detract from the story's meaning.
Sethe (Winfrey) is a runaway slave who has a simple existence with her daughter Denver (Kimberley Elise), in rural Ohio. The year is 1873, and an angry spirit haunts the house they live in. Sethe's past, we learn, contains disturbing memories of unforgettable sins, which seem to get progressively worse as the film plods along. The two are joined by Paul D (Danny Glover), a former slave who stays with Sethe and Denver in the hope of becoming a family. But a mysterious guest who goes by the name of Beloved (Thandie Newton) arrives on the scene. Where she came from, who she came with and why she is there is at first a mystery, but later things are revealed as the past once again comes up to bite Sethe.
Although adapted from Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved doesn't seem very literate. There are moments in novels that cannot retain much of their power once a conversion to film has been made; that's just the way it is, I guess. As easily as a picture can tell a thousand words, words usually have greater meaning. The pictures that cinematographer Tak Fujimoto uses are very fine indeed, ranging from the ghostly looking old house (which was built especially for the film) to the grainy texture of the story's flashbacks. Where Beloved fails is sustaining power in its imagery; for all the disturbing images evoked, the script doesn't have the power to back them up. Illiterate is not the right word - inferior, perhaps, is.
That's not to say that Beloved was a mistake to make, since Jonathan Demme has a solid shot at getting it right. He squeezes strong performances from all of his cast, notably Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Beloved's strange actions and manner of speaking no doubt demanded a lot of talent from Thandie Newton, but her character frustrated me for those reasons. I was patiently waiting for Beloved's emotional climax in which her actions would form a basis of understanding for her character, but that never came.
Demme also directs with a flair for the bizarre, which isn't surprising considering this is the man who turned the grim Silence of the Lambs into an Oscar winning success. Needless of how good the final product turned out to be, Beloved deserves respect as an artistic creation that ventures into the realms of the extraordinary, without losing sight of what _makes_ something extraordinary. But Beloved as a whole does not fit into that category. It is a film that attempts to be better than most but ends up falling behind, primarily due to inefficient scripting and editing. To see an extraordinary film that is extraordinarily made - now that would be something.
Read more of my reviews at In Film Australia http://infilmau.iah.net
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews