A blast of 'Beloved.'

Interview, Nov, 1998 by Lisa Kennedy

Is it possible for a movie to be haunted with a sense of purpose? Two years after Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985) launched a thousand tribal battles between black men and black women, Oprah Winfrey bought the rights to Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. Just over a decade later, Jonathan Demme has directed an adaptation with Winfrey and Danny Glover, two of the stars of Spielberg's film. But Beloved is transcendent where The Color Purple floundered, not because Glover now plays a sympathetic black man - though there's a karmic beauty in that - but because Demme honors Morrison's poetics with a visual language of complementary richness and sophistication.

In the movie, the ghost of an infant named Beloved, who was slain eighteen years earlier, returns in the body of the woman she would have become to pay her family a visit. When this ghost first emerges fully clothed from a river - with the softest, newest skin and butterflies and ladybugs springing from her - thoughts about birth or rebirth are not unreasonable. The apparition also raises questions about the intertwining of the real and the metaphorical, and the destructive and instructive forces of personal and historical memory. In the best tradition of magical realist figures, the specter doesn't merely dredge up the past of her mother, Sethe (Winfrey); it rattles the rafters of a community, even a nation. What an inventive agent of remembrance and loss - an itty-bitty baby girl spirit trapped in a body that teeters and lumbers, laughs and rages, drools and shines, and indicts slavery in a way no onscreen character has before.

If Thandie Newton's portrayal of Beloved strikes viewers as genuinely otherworldly, it comes as no surprise to the actress. "People have told me I seemed possessed, which is flattering on one level," says Newton, in a voice that's nothing like the raw, uncanny timbre she discovered to convey Beloved's new and tenuous relationship to language. "But when I felt like there was something moving in me, it wasn't a spirit. It was just the essence."

The twenty-six-year-old Newton made her debut at age sixteen in the Australian coming-of-age film Flirting (1990). Her more recent roles in Jefferson in Paris (1995) and The Journey of August King (1995) suggest there's an intellectual curiosity informing her choices as an actress, one in keeping with her anthropology degree from Cambridge. "We were learning about the slave trade when I got those two scripts through the mail," Newton recalls. "I thought, How better to fuel my interest in this than to work in movies?"

She admits to not knowing who Beloved was or how to play her at first. Was she really the incarnation of a baby released from slavery in tragic fashion? Was her appearance a powerful delusion or an overwhelming forging of loss and desire into a flesh-and-bone miracle? "I studied contemporary accounts of people who had been locked away since childhood," she says. "When the woman on whom I based most of my research started making noises that sounded anything like speech, they were very high-pitched, so I went with that. Whenever she walked she had her hands out in front of her; I went with that. She made noises when she ate, she would sometimes miss her face. Coordination was off." It is a field scientist's approach to a role, but it works. Now when she looks at Beloved in the film, Newton says she doesn't recognize herself. "I can't equate myself with that in any way."

Newton once asked Morrison to describe the character. The author told her, "Beloved is like when you go into an old mansion and they have all those huge, ornate family portraits on the wall. It's one of those portraits that when you move, the eyes move. That's Beloved." Audiences of the film may feel like they, too, are being watched, for Beloved is not just the ghost of one family; she is the ghost of America, the embodiment of a legacy that haunts us still.