'Beloved' Spreads Its Boughs

BELOVED

Directed by Jonathan Demme

Starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover

In Hollywood, slavery and its infamous legacy have begun to serve as outlets for ambitious filmmaking, whether through wrenching visual impact or intense emotional experience. In recent memory, Edward Zwick delved into the psyche of the black soldier for his sweeping Civil War epic Glory, while Steven Spielberg intertwined visually jarring images of slavery with courtroom drama in Amistad.

In films like Amistad, slavery is used as a visual bulldozer, meant to overwhelm viewers through its shocking brutality and painful inhumanity. In Beloved, the highly-anticipated adaptation of Toni Morrison's lauded Pulitzer Prize winning novel, slavery is explored in a much subtler, almost metaphorical fashion. It is an exercise in psychology, exploring the mind of Morrison's steel-willed protagonist Sethe (Oprah Winfrey), a former slave who now lives as a free woman in Ohio in the 1870s. Sethe is a strong woman of fierce determination but she is haunted, both literally and figuratively, by the pain and horror of her scarred past in bondage. On the outside, Sethe is a pillar of strength and stability, but her soul is reflected by the web of scars that snake up her back like some grotesque tree.

Beloved begins with the reunion of Sethe and Paul D (Danny Glover), a sweet-natured former slave whom Sethe has not seen in eighteen years. Paul D, dusty and hardened but always with a twinkle in his eye, wants to start a new life with Sethe and her quiet daughter Denver (Kimberly Elise), who is bright and beautiful but is also being suffocated by her mother's overprotective rein. All goes well at first as Paul D begins to unlock Sethe's heart and melt Denver's cold demeanor through his natural charm and exuberance. But their fragile existence becomes threatened by the emergence of a strange girl known simply as Beloved (Thandie Newton), who may or may not be the incarnation of the daughter Sethe was forced to murder in her sordid past. As Beloved's presence becomes more and more devastating, Paul D finds himself tested by a number of painful secrets and Sethe plunges into a downward spiral of madness and depression.

Beloved is a handsome, classy production that is distinguished in every possible way, but it is also a cold film, emotionally frigid at times, that is never able to truly absorb the viewer into its subject matter. The screenplay, written by Adam Brooks, Akosua Busia and Richard LaGravenese, grapples admirably with Morrison's convoluted narrative but can never get to the heart of it. The strength of Morrison's book is her flowing prose and her ability to weave her story over time, but without her voice or that framework, the movie moves as slowly as molasses through its near three-hour running time. The other great flaw of Beloved is its failure to reconcile the way in which Morrison erases the line between reality and the supernatural. On the screen, the characters treat such extraordinary occurrences as flying dishes, moving tables and spirits as a part of everyday life--this distorts the film's focus in confusing fashion. It is never clear what is supposed to be symbolic of madness or what is simply real, especially when it comes to the character of Beloved.

The saving grace of the movie is the renowned cast and their moving, spirited performances. Danny Glover, who is pretty much only seen in the increasingly silly Lethal Weapon movies these days, delivers an ardent reminder of what a fine actor he really is. His portrayal of Paul D is vivacious, endearing and painfully vulnerable. Kimberly Elise gives a burning, multifaceted performance as Denver. She conveys so much with one facial expression that she is able to counter with relative ease Thandie Newton's grating-at-best turn as Beloved. Oprah Winfrey, who snatched up the rights to Morrison's book in 1988 and coddled them for nearly a decade, delivers an impassioned performance as Sethe, the woman who desperately wants to live a simple life but finds her past will not let her. For all the strength and dedication Winfrey brings to the role, there is still the nagging sense that the movie is unable to grasp the true inner conflict of her character. Without the novelist's luxury of being able to enter a character's head, Beloved is only able to deliver a skin-deep version of Sethe, one whose subconscious turmoil is never clearly evident.

Beloved also marks the welcome return of Jonathan Demme, who directed Hollywood's ultimate psychological thriller, The Silence of the Lambs. The Silence of the Lambs was a showcase of visual ferocity, superb camera prowess and raw lyrical power; Demme told the story in such riveting fashion that the film still chills to the bone, even today. Beloved is his first film since Philadelphia in 1993, and while he cannot quite capture the essence of the book here, he still demonstrates the ample talent that helped him win an Academy Award. Demme is still a master of camerawork, as he stitches together a rich array of shots and turns Sethe's house into a brooding metaphor of claustrophobia. However, he does not nail the pacing the way he did in Silence of the Lambs and he muddles the majority of the flashbacks. Ironically, the film is most lively when it resorts to Hollywood dramatics, most notably in a harrowing sequence in which Sethe is more willing to murder her children then see them return to slavery.

Beloved has been pegged as a heavy Oscar favorite, mainly because of its important subject matter and prestigious ensemble, and it has many admirable qualities. But it does not reach the powerful fever pitch of a film such as Saving Private Ryan, where viewers are so riveted that they can't take their eyes off the screen. For all its grace and dignity, Beloved is a movie to be respected but not loved.