Bewitching Beloved

By RICHARD CORLISS

Thin love ain't no love at all," says Sethe, the fiercely defiant runaway slave in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Oprah Winfrey's love for the book was thick, warm, abiding. With eyewitness immediacy and the God's-eye view of fictive art, Morrison brought the intimate evil of slavery to life in the story of a mother's ultimate sacrifice. When Winfrey discovered the novel upon its publication in 1987, she was moved as a reader, as an African American, as a woman who suffered the death of the child she gave birth to when she was 14; for Oprah, Beloved was a central fable of her race and sex. She knew she had to produce a movie version, though she was new at that job. And though she had appeared in only two films at the time, she meant to cast herself in the lead role. "I think I can play Sethe," she told Morrison. "And if I can't, I'll learn how."

What Oprah wants, Oprah gets. She has, after all, earned an Oscar nomination for her first movie part, in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. For more than a decade she has dominated the afternoon airwaves with her syndicated talk show. She is among the nation's most admired and influential people. Now, 11 years after first reading the Morrison novel, here she is as the producer of what she told screenwriter Richard LaGravenese would be "my Schindler's List": a pristine, potent distillation of Beloved, which opens Oct. 16. And there she is onscreen as Sethe. Or rather--and here's a sweet jolt--there is Sethe onscreen, with Oprah living, hiding inside her.

Winfrey is barely recognizable, not because she uses putty or prostheses but because she has deglamourized herself and renounced the oozing empathy of her TV stardom. "As soon as I saw her I smiled to myself," Morrison says, "because I did not think of the brand name. She looked like Sethe. She inhabited the role."

Under the bold, sensitive direction of Jonathan Demme, Winfrey's Sethe is a creature as stern as she is strong--as much oak as flesh and blood. She moves with the heaviness of someone dragging large and fatal memories behind her like a full steamer trunk. She is, as the book puts it, "iron-eyed"; her gaze is an Old Testament judgment, her love a demon that can crush those it enfolds. The actress and the character share intelligence and passion, but in many particulars Sethe is the anti-Oprah. If Sethe were a talk-show host, she would stare down her guests and say, "You think you've had troubles..."

Now imagine how Jerry Springer would herald her performance: Oprah makes love with a naked Danny Glover! Oprah squats and urinates! Oprah as Sethe: Victim or murderer? The story is based on the true case of Margaret Garner, a renegade slave who tried to kill her children rather than allow them to be returned to the plantation from which she had escaped. In the novel, Sethe is pursued by the spirit of the one child, Beloved, who died at her hand. But the film is really about the things we do for love, about the fatal consequences of moral strength, about the need to hold on to what we've given up for lost or dead.

Ohio, 1873, eight years after the Civil War, 18 years after Sethe ran away from the Sweet Home plantation. She had been defiled by the master's sons, then beaten so artistically that her back remains latticed with scars. Now Sethe lives with her teenage daughter Denver (Kimberly Elise) at 124 Bluestone Road--a house that jitters and glows red with the rambunctious ghost of Beloved.

The women are used to these seismic spectral disruptions, but Paul D (Glover), another wounded veteran of Sweet Home, is not. As much as he wants to stay with Sethe, to rest in her powerful arms, 124 gives him the creeps. And when a strange young woman (Thandie Newton) comes to live with them, he is made more restless still. She wheezes and snores; she moves like a puppet on tangled strings. Asked her name, she spells it out in her croaking voice: "B-E-L-O-V-E-D."

Beloved will wreak much mischief as she befriends the three living residents of this haunted house, sparking jealousy, infidelity and finally scandal among the good ladies of the emerging black middle class. In Sethe, who believes her to be her dead child revived, Beloved cues the brutal hierarchy of a mother's love.

With just four major characters, a family in the vise of the past, a haunted house and nearly three hours of running time, the Beloved film suggests a sultry cousin of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Demme, in working with screenwriter Adam Brooks on the final version of LaGravenese's script, found himself looking back further. "The more we focused in on 124 Bluestone Road, the more I thought, 'This is Ibsen, this is Chekhov, this is Morrison.'"

However it is slimmed down, and although its conclusion holds more hope than the book's, the movie is certainly Morrison. Says Demme: "Almost everything, every line of dialogue, every article of clothing, every detail we shamelessly took from the book to put in the movie. If Toni Morrison said black dress, it was going to be a black dress. We were slavish," he adds, without apparent irony. The film is also attentive to the change of seasons in the year of the story's life; the surrounding woods and streams are limned in lustrous imagery. But the whole picture, with its flashes of desaturated color and reversal film stock, is a visual trip. In one sense, this ranks as Demme's most adventurous and painterly film. Like Spielberg, another movie boy wonder in his 50s, Demme has made a new movie that plunders and enriches the cinematic vocabulary.

In another sense, Winfrey's production of Beloved is a logical extension of her TV book club; it brings a novel she loves to millions, who can read it at the movies. Morrison was an early beneficiary of Oprah's literary saleswomanship; her 1977 Song of Solomon was the book club's second selection. "Sales were thunderous!" the author says. "It sold more in three or four months than it had in its entire 20 years."

But none of Morrison's novels had been filmed, and that was fine with her. "I was always annoyed," says the author and Princeton professor, "when my students would ask, 'When is there going to be a movie?' I told them that a novel is not what happens before the movie. Why can't it just be a book?" Morrison knows the page and the screen are only distantly related, especially in the adaptation of a novel like Beloved--dense, elliptical, teeming with allusion and metaphor, leaping from now to then and back again, in pain. Turning a book into a film, Morrison notes, is "an ongoing battle, between the images of language and the images of the image. That's what the creative process is."

Ah, but who can say no to Oprah? Recalls Morrison: "She said, and this is kind of charming, 'I am going in my pocketbook and write a check.' I wasn't talking to a studio or a lawyer but to another human being. If you'll excuse it, it reminded me of myself. A single black woman who said, 'Well, I'm doing this. It's going to be hard for me, but that's beside the point.' This was a big project and, for her, a big deal. And she was deadly serious about every aspect of it."

In late 1996, Winfrey sent LaGravenese's script to Demme. He read it on a Christmas vacation, called Winfrey and asked, "Now what do I have to do?" Finding a director was that simple. Making the movie was harder--not just re-creating Reconstruction-era Cincinnati in today's Philadelphia and Delaware but also finding the crucially right actors for four shifting, demanding roles, in which Glover would be the only other star. Newton, the Anglo-African actress who illuminated Flirting and Jefferson in Paris, came to the first script reading with an early, teasing hint of her character's mannerisms; her regal beauty explains how Beloved can cast a spell over Sethe and her brood. In the role of Baby Suggs, Beah Richards, who 30 years ago won an Oscar nomination for playing Sidney Poitier's mother in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, serves as both Greek chorus and black preacher; her sermons give the film heft and life.

But it is Elise, a University of Minnesota graduate whose only previous feature was the femme-bonding comedy Set It Off, who is the headline find. Her Denver is alert both to the pain of being insufficiently loved and the frail promise life may hold for a young black woman after slavery. By the end of the film her posture has smartened, her smile is knowing; leaving the house, she becomes a freed slave, not unmindful of Sethe but unchained to her. If Beloved is to succeed with viewers, it will be in part because they recognize that the film belongs, eventually, to Elise; she is the hope that can rise from hurt. "Watching her was so gratifying," Morrison says. "Every time she was onscreen I was happy. You know that feeling: 'Oh, she's back.'"

Elise could radiate; Winfrey had to seethe. "On the surface," Demme notes, "Sethe is stoic, immovable, but inside she's an inferno of emotions. Oprah had to find the exact way to communicate both of these things, and it was great theater every day watching her do it. There were times when Oprah the person would be so overwhelmed with compassion and empathy for Sethe the character that her emotions would take her far away from where Sethe needed to be. As Toni Morrison told me, 'Remember, Jonathan, Oprah cries. Sethe doesn't.'"

Through a tough course of suppression and revelation, Winfrey finally got it right. This isn't a gimmick performance; it is genuine acting, and it abrades nicely against the more ingratiating characters in the ensemble. Her work will be called brave, but really it's canny; Oprah becoming the anti-Oprah will win deserved praise. Off camera, though, she was totally Oprah. Demme tells of an electrician on the crew who was in a deep depression over a family crisis. Winfrey, who didn't know the circumstances but could tell something was wrong, went to the man and hugged him. He later told Demme that he found Winfrey's words wonderfully healing.

Morrison had attended the first read-through--what she calls "stroke-the-author time"--and visited the set, where she fell in love with the costume people and their meticulous work. "The fabrics they had!" she exclaims. "They had boots from Italy with the buttons up the side. And the underclothes with six inches of lace on the skirts, the likes of which you have not seen. How many people had been blinded making these things?"

Now that the movie was made, Morrison had to see it. On first viewing, she inevitably compared it to the drama she had dreamed up, the landscape she'd devised. "Was this the house? Was this the yard? Is this the way the stairway looked?" Well, no: "The house I had in mind was much more elegant, more middle class, because it had belonged to an upper-middle-class white abolitionist family. Their version downscaled it."

She realizes that she is speaking like a protective mother--like Sethe speaking of Beloved. "The movie I'd have done would have taken about a day. Which is why I never would participate in the movie in any way, except to shoot my mouth off. I think moviemakers ought to do the work they do and I should do the work I do." It took three viewings to provide Morrison with the distance she needed to get near it. "And I found myself mesmerized by looking at the story, not thinking it, but looking at it."

And responding to it. "There's a moment," she says, "when you see Sethe's mother in the hanging scene. You see her eyes. To see that come alive was breathtaking." She was finally pleased and surprised by the achievement. "They did something I thought they never could: to make the film represent not the abstraction of slavery but the individuals, the domestic qualities and consequences of it."

There are viewers, sympathetic ones, who will find Beloved more admirable than involving. The focus on stern Sethe and her closed fist of a heart may put audiences at a distance; and 174 minutes is a lot of time to spend with four troubled souls moseying toward inevitability. But the popularity of pizazzy Hollywood melodrama should not mean that the only movie pace is four-on-the-floor frantic. Beloved has a pulse that beats slower because the hearts of its characters are heavier; but that pulse is evidence of complex people sifting through the ashes of a national tragedy, trying to find meaning and a reason to hope.

For Winfrey, it was a big gamble that deserves a solid payoff. As Demme says, "She is, indeed, the mother of the movie." The film has many gifted midwives. But it was Winfrey who gave birth to a strong, stately film; to the chance for a renewed awareness of how slavery's shackles still chafe. She has also given birth to herself--as a force in a Hollywood that needs a more mature future, and in an America that needs to remember its past.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles