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| Images courtesy of Buena Vista Pictures Distribution |
Toni Morrison’s 1987 post-Civil War period horror novel Beloved
about a troubled family of former Black slaves whose Southern Cincinnati
home is haunted by a malevolent entity followed by the seeming reincarnation of
one of the family members went on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning work of
contemporary historical fiction in American literature. Loosely based on the true story of Margaret
Garner a former enslaved person in Kentucky who fled to free Ohio in 1856, it
told of her initial capture under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 where U.S. marshals
found her trying to kill her children in the hopes of sparing their return to
slavery. Drawing from an 1856 newspaper
article called A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child which
was later reprinted in an anthology edited by Toni Morrison, the text intended
to be emblematic of the deep seated impact slavery can have on the psyche and
spirit caught the attention of American talk show host and part-time actress
Oprah Winfrey who optioned the rights to the novel shortly after its release.
A passion project ten years in gestation which Winfrey
shopped around before landing on The Silence of the Lambs director and
co-producer Jonathan Demme with her preferred choice of Danny Glover as her
central co-star, Beloved took shape in the form of an uncompromising and
confrontational three-hour journey featuring arguably the very pinnacle of
Winfrey’s acting capabilities. Expansive
and vast yet intimate and deeply personal, Beloved follows former slave
Sethe (Oprah Winfrey) living in Cincinnati, Ohio coping with an angry
poltergeist that drives out two of her three children. Years later living with her daughter Denver
(Kimberly Elise), old pal Paul D (Danny Glover whom she met on the plantation
she escaped from) reenters her life and winds up driving the entity out. In its place however arrives a young vocally
stunted otherworldly woman who calls herself Beloved (an extraterrestrial Thandiwe
Newton) who may or may not be the reincarnation of one of her ‘runaway’
children. Over the course of the three-hour
journey, as seen through surreal flashbacks, the actual parameters of this already
haunted scenario take on far more disturbing and harrowing implications.
A sustained, unrelenting, confrontational journey into the heart
of distinctly American darkness attempting to convey the experience and
psychological toll of slavery on human beings told through the prism of a
tragic ghost story which takes the supernatural fusion with the mental and emotional
damage seriously. Much of this stems
from Jonathan Demme and his longtime cinematographer Tak Fujimoto’s trained precise
camerawork and use of lighting, carrying over the spiritual red light from the
novel literally onscreen in a technique that will have some viewers recalling
the underground prison of The Silence of the Lambs. Further, Fujimoto utilized reversal stock
film for the scattershot flashback sequences.
Featuring elongated unbroken takes of the actors staring directly into
the camera in tight harrowing Bergmanesque close-ups including impassioned
soliloquies from Oprah Winfrey and broken inhuman dialogue from Thandiwe Newton,
it is an insular chamber piece which largely remains imprisoned with our
characters in this Ohio based haunted shack.
Blistering in its implications including but not limited to gang rape, whipping,
exorcism and murder, this can be a horrific sit were it not anchored by the
powerful performances of its central leads.
With its soulful yet occasionally scary score by Rachel
Portman, detailed period production design by Kristi Zea and costumes by
Colleen Atwood, the feel of the world of Beloved is at once familiarly
of the Deep South while also feeling threateningly of a kind of spirit world
where the dead coexist among the living.
Working from a screenplay co-written by Akosua Busia, Richard
LaGravenese and Adam Brooks, Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Kimberly Elise and
particularly Thandiwe Newton are all working to the very edge of their
inspirations. Oprah, ordinarily a perky
and bright talk show host, has to portray a wealth of deathly dark and terrible
emotional weathers onscreen as a woman of intense damage beyond repair and she
doesn’t shy away from anything. Danny
Glover is a master in his own right and the casting serves as a minor
screen-reunion for him and Winfrey post-The Color Purple. Thandiwe Newton however is the one of the
trio who goes the absolute full distance, portraying a woman whose soul might
be partially stuck in the afterlife who does everything from graphic nudity to
drooling to this gravely inhuman voice which sounds very like Mercedes
McCambridge’s demon voice in The Exorcist.
Despite the pedigree of the source, the filmmaking and the
acting, Beloved while a critical darling was a commercial failure. Costing somewhere in the $80 million range,
quite costly for a provocative if not transgressive quasi-stage-to-screen
adaptation, the three-hour epic was overshadowed by the box office success of Bride
of Chucky and only made a mere near $23 million. Oprah Winfrey who did everything from allowing
herself to be tied up, blindfolded and left in the woods for twenty-four hours
for research on the experience of slavery, went into a depression over the film’s
meager financial reception and reportedly binge ate. Moreover, parent company Disney looking for
another hit moved Beloved out of theaters to make room for the next Adam
Sandler venture The Waterboy. A
work of fire and passion, the film did go on to garner an Academy Award
nomination for Colleen Atwood’s costume design while Kimberly Elise won the
Chicago Film Critics Award for Most Promising Actress and Danny Glover won the
NAACP Image Award for Best Actor.
Looking at the film decades later, it is every bit of a
sustained trained unblinking deep dive into the overarching, sometimes
invisible, effects and impact of slavery on human beings. As a Jonathan Demme picture, effectively a
distinctly Black drama by a White director, it represents one of the filmmaker’s
most ambitious undertakings: a faithful, honest adaptation of one of Oprah
Winfrey’s cherished film projects if not her most personal one. With affecting, transformative performances
from all the principal cast members and brilliant, searing technical filmmaking
of a still disturbing historical text about one of America’s darkest and most
difficult chapters, Beloved is an underseen, underrated masterpiece. In a post-Sinners world of epic Black
cinema channeling specifically the Black American experience, Beloved is
more than ripe for ferocious rediscovery and a call for celebration in the
annals of American cinema.
--Andrew Kotwicki
