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With the first week's gross receipts in, it appears The Walt Disney Company and producer/actress Oprah Winfrey may have done just that in bringing author Toni Morrison's Beloved to the screen. While literate, humanistic and historically important, director Jonathan Demme's beautifully filmed adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel finished 5th in the attendance stakes, three full slots behind Bride of Chucky. No literary slouches themselves, the Chucky people have apparently read their Mencken.
Truth be told, this is a large and ambitious effort, a highly cerebral art film wrapped in big movie trappings. Its scorching, unrelenting focus on a family of ex-slaves just shortly before and after the Civil War is a compelling, thought-provoking call to conscience. Delivered with the supernatural cant Ms. Morrison wielded in her book in order to impart emotions and truths that defied mortal explanation, the complicated work is thick with abstraction and metaphor. African mysticism snakes its way through the fibres of the script. Highly unsettling apparitions, who go bump in the day as well as the night, decry the unthinkable horrors of the slave experience. Rachel Portman's haunting, drumbeat-and-chanting score underscores the portentous doings.
In short, it won't play in Peoria. At least not until it's available on videotape, when the Peorians can press pause during its very demanding, near-three-hour length.
But for those inclined to invest the time and mental energy, Beloved promises a night at the bijou not quite like any other movie-going experience. It is a shocking look-see, conceived by an uncompromising intellectual of the first magnitude.
We are introduced to Sethe, the runaway slave who, with her three children, settles as a free woman in Ohio with her mother-in-law, the much-loved Baby Suggs (superbly created by Beah Richards). A hopeful old gal full of practical and metaphysical wisdom, Baby is legend among the emancipated black community for her uplifting, woodland sermons.
Sethe is not quite so positive. Portrayed with a sincere dedication that supplements what she might be lacking in thespic ability, Ms. Winfrey's Sethe is a perplexing mass of bad memories and haunting fears. Like her conscience-tortured Holocaust analogy in Sophie's Choice, the scarred soul harbours a dark, deep secret. Yet she protects a small and carefully nurtured wish, determined to make a life for herself and her children. But, the question is agonisingly pondered throughout the film: Can one look to the future with any kind of hope when the horrid past seems so irreconcilable?
The well-travelled road in front of Sethe's house is ripe with life's passing pageant and full of possibilities, good and bad. And one day it brings a face from home -- one that's been wandering the roads for 18 years. It's Paul D., a garrulous and kindly man magnificently played by Danny Glover. He is Sethe's brother-in-law. And his timely arrival forces Sethe to face the facts: that the man she married in a slave ceremony back on the plantation is probably lost to the ages, never to be reunited with wife and children. This realisation makes the visitor a proper suitor.
Paul D. is warned that Sethe's house is haunted, but remains undaunted in his romantic zeal. The affair that ensues is the most sensitive and understanding take on love among the middle-aged set since Streep and Eastwood paired off in The Bridges Of Madison County.
But of course, there are the usual, as well as unusual, problems. Among the more expected issues, Sethe's teen-aged daughter, Denver (nicely exacted by Kimberly Elise), is jealous of the attentions Paul D. is diverting away from her. But just when Glover's character seems to be assuaging daughter dear, the resident ghost starts making known its objections to the romantic interloper. It is Denver's contention that the angry spirit is her sister who died in infancy.
It's at this point that the story really turns up the weird quotient. Enter stage left, Beloved (wonderfully realised by Thandie Newton). Emerging from a nearby lake as if rising up from the primordial ooze, the beautiful young woman is dressed in black and covered with bugs. Walking like it's a completely new experience, she is a study in precariousness. The title character babbles, grunts, and snorts like a dyspeptic baby (but wait, the full litany of bad health habits is yet to come). Somehow, she makes her way to the house.
Sethe and Denver are mysteriously drawn to this presence and almost immediately accept her as their own. Paul D. is confounded by the curious turn of events. Acting as the writer's spiritual variation on the deus ex machina, Beloved's visit brings profound and psychological baggage to the fore, setting several of the tale's major and minor impetuses in motion.
Nothing is told simply or simply told in Mr. Demme's filmic translation of Toni Morrison's deeply poetic saga. If there's an oblique way to purvey a concept, then that's how it's done. And while this heavy shadowing may serve to symbolically echo the ambiguity confused former slaves are faced with in post abolition America, a more direct telling may have made this story more palpable for the Peorians in us all. In this form, Beloved earns our respect, but not necessarily our love.
Perhaps the movie studio could improve its numbers by offering a free master's degree in literature via correspondence course for every ticket sold to Beloved. Seeing this challenging motion picture would be an apt first assignment.
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