Recovered Classic: Beloved


Slave epics are renowned for being potent, hard-hitting movies which have a habit of shredding the viewer’s emotions and leaving an indelible impression. Amistad was a classic example, a film featuring a big name cast which helped to launch the career of Djimon Honsou. A year later it was Beloved’s turn to carry the flag of repression, a big screen version of celebrated American author Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book which was finally made into a film after a decade of production toil by chat show queen Oprah Winfrey. Various parallels could be drawn with Amistad, notably the emergence of another big talent in Thandie Newton, but while the cast in the later film was hardly major league, the quality of the movie certainly was.

It’s only fair to point out straight away that Beloved is a harrowing experience, an unsettling and emotionally challenging film about a woman’s sins literally coming back to haunt her which requires a fair amount of stamina if you want to make it through to the end credits. It’s certainly not a mass appeal movie, but for those who manage to stick with it, the rewards are strangely fulfilling, if a little disconcerting.

Set in 1870s Ohio, director Jonathan Demme doesn’t entertain any first real pleasantries, his dramatic and unsettling opening scene setting the tone for what follows. As a poltergeist rampages through the home of central character Sethe (Winfrey)—a runaway slave who is struggling to carve out a simple existence with her three children—their dog’s left eye springs from its socket. Calmly, and unflinchingly, Sethe squeezes it back into place, a chilling indication that we are dealing with no ordinary woman.

But she has endured a far from ordinary life, having escaped from slave plantation Sweet Home (“It wasn’t sweet and it wasn’t home,”) in order to protect her young family. Her time at the plantation was hell on earth, the startling sequence of events (including the death of a child) being slowly revealed in a series of shocking flashbacks that unveil the staggering truth.
Once a free woman, Sethe is abandoned by her two sons who quickly flee from their possessed home, leaving her to care for youngest child Denver (Kimberly Elise), who was born during the escape from Sweet Home and who has become a social outcast due to her mother’s suffocating protection. Winfrey’s life perks up, however, when Paul D (Danny Glover) unexpectedly arrives on the scene, an old friend from Sweet Home who is looking for work. Then the mysterious Beloved (Thandie Newton) makes an appearance, a disturbed individual whose devastating presence threatens to shatter everybody’s world.

To describe Demme’s unsettling and demanding movie as harrowing would be something of an understatement, the director having gone to such lengths to drive home the turmoil, savagery and human tragedy which courses through Morrison’s book, that being entertained is simply not an option. Beloved is really more of an ordeal, mostly because it’s such a long and distressing experience, which offers glimpses of Sethe’s pain and suffering (whiplash scars on her back and nightmare flashbacks) before Newton’s character sparks the unveiling of the awful truth. Indeed, it’s through these sepia-coloured flashbacks that Demme rams home most of the movie’s startling revelations, his use of filters and leeched-out colours emphasising the haunting and tormented atmosphere which rips through the entire story and which he’s toyed with before in The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia.

It’s uncomfortable viewing and as a movie it makes considerable demands on the viewer, but this is a film of real heart and substance, a vivid retelling of a brutal yet brilliant book which may give short shrift to its male characters on the big screen, but which is nevertheless compelling stuff. The performances, for example, are uniformly excellent, particularly the impressive Winfrey, appearing in her first film role since earning an Oscar nomination for The Color Purple. Newton is also in splendid form, her twisted, contorted, witch-like wild child (and that unnerving voice) verging on the over-indulgent, but just falling the right side of excessive. Additional impressive support is provided by Beah Richards as Sethe’s mother-in-law, who commands an electric screen presence during her frequent spiritualist ceremonies.

Something of a love-it-or-hate-it trial by human suffering, the movie’s fractured structure demands a high level of concentration, because while all the pieces are there, it’s up to the viewer to put many of them back together. Such a challenging approach is uncommon, but then again, Morrison’s labyrinthine book was hardly run-of-the-mill. As director, Demme deserves much of the credit, but his cast is fabulous, the period detail superb and there’s no doubt Beloved leaves a lasting impression. Whether good or bad, however, could largely depend on your staying power.

David Lichtneker

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