Beloved

Commonweal, Nov 20, 1998 by Richard Alleva

To judge the film Beloved as a self-sufficient work of art is impossible. Even someone who hasn't read the Toni Morrison novel may sense that what's on screen is misshaped, that important narrative material has been dropped or sloppily conveyed, that colorful details have been blown out of proportion. One somehow hears the fingers of beleaguered scriptwriters shuffling through hundreds of Pulitzer-prize winning pages, and the squeak of magic markers yellowing vital passages and crossing out others not so vital and then writing "stet!" over the latter when it's decided that they are vital after all. One hears the voice of Oprah (hoarse from script conferences carried on into the wee hours of morning) pleading that a scene not be cut because, dammit! I was inspired to do this movie when I read that very scene! And one hears other equally hoarse but smaller voices warning that, if we do include that passage then we have to keep the following one, too, because both sections depend on each other, but we're looking at a script that's an hour too long already and. . . so forth. I'm not echoing show-biz gossip. This movie exudes desperation.

The Morrison story is a genre-stretching work. Perhaps influenced by the "magic realism" of South American writers, the novelist uses gothic horror as an inroad to the abiding horrors of slavery. On the outskirts of Cincinnati in the 1870s, the house of an ex-slave, Sethe (Winfrey), is being haunted. The spirit behaves like an angry poltergeist, drives Sethe's sons away but forms a truce with her daughter, Denver, who then withdraws from the world. When an old friend, Paul D., becomes Sethe's live-in lover and faces down the poltergeist, the spirit incarnates itself as a lovely but seemingly retarded adolescent girl who calls herself Beloved and takes over the household by befriending Denver and seducing Paul D. Eventually it's revealed that Beloved is the daughter Sethe killed almost twenty years before in order to preserve her from the horrors of slavery when an old master came to reclaim his runaway slaves.

Many themes are here, explored perhaps in depth in the novel, but only skimmed on screen. To list a few: the scars of slavery unhealed by freedom; sex used as a weapon (first by slave owners on slaves, then by Beloved as a take-over bid); the religiosity of American blacks, feeding off Southern Protestantism but taking on a unique life of its own; the "thick love" (Sethe's phrase) of a mother who so desperately wants to protect her children from a brutal world that she turns herself into a Medea. And isn't it a boon to the filmmakers that Morrison explores these themes within the framework of a ghost story, for haven't the movies always thrived on the horror and allure of the supernatural?

A boon, perhaps, but also a trap that the director Jonathan Demme and his collaborators walked right into. Toni Morrison deployed and controlled the ghostly elements of her story with her powerful and flexible prose style. Her language says boo!, then her language calms us down. We see ghosts only when her words allow us to and, even then, only within the context of normal human activity.

But horror on screen is both more immediately shocking and more combustible than literary spookiness. When director Jack Clayton made The Innocents, his adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, he measured his shocks out in small doses so we wouldn't miss the struggle going on within his heroine. But Demme slathers on his effects. The very first scene of the poltergeist's attack, with a dog slammed so hard against a wall that its eye pops out, is straight from Exorcist territory, and so are the early appearances of Beloved, skin acrawl with insects, speaking at first in a basso profundo, later in babyish prattle. The lighting effects recall science fiction thrillers like The Fly or Stargate, and they come on so strong and so soon that they put us in the wrong frame of mind for the subtle human relationships that follow.

Perhaps we could adjust ourselves to slower, more meditative rhythms if the script weren't so smudgy. Much of the talk between Sethe and Paul D. is about their past, yet not much of it is drawn with vividness or even clarity, except the physical brutalities of whipping and lynching. For instance, what was Sethe's husband like? What were the relations between him and Sethe? between him and Paul D.? Was Paul D. in love with Sethe decades ago? Why was the slave owner called "Schoolteacher"? Why couldn't Sethe and her husband reunite after slavery was abolished? The answers may be on the page, but they're not up there on the screen or on the soundtrack.

Or maybe they are on the latter but I just couldn't hear them. The intimate moments are muffled by underplaying less subtle than enervated. Oprah Winfrey proved her talent a decade ago with her excellent work in The Color Purple, but as Sethe she's surprisingly dim. Morrison has created an ambivalent figure, loving but smothering, righteous but guilt-stricken. No matter how good Sethe is, a glint of the demoniac must be seen in her eyes, for, as Denver later points out, Beloved may be not just a ghost but a manifestation of part of Sethe's psyche. Winfrey's relative blandness doesn't capture this.