Beloved . Newcity Chicago . 10-19-98

Beloved

DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Demme

REVIEWED: 10-19-98

Directed by Jonathan Demme. In "The Silence of the Lambs," director Johnathan Demme hit the switches and put a flashlight under the faces of his stars, earning the leads Oscars for their work in his milieu of pared-down effects and pervasive claustrophobia. This time around, the ghost story is Toni Morrison's most revered tale of ex-slaves gripped by the past, a tribute to the oral tradition with its rich language of memory. But the result is a long, spare, darkly lit film, filled with large faces that consume the entire frame and reminisce for a while. With its exhausting number of fade-outs and stagey lighting (ie, red light in a hallway signifies evil), it begins to look more like a badly adapted play, and so-in plays as in ghost stories-it falls to the actors to carry "Beloved." Do they make it? The film's just a hair too heavy. As Sethe, a free woman now living in her own large, creepy house after the war, Oprah is, as usual, quite good. Righteous, but humbled by a certain persistent naiveté and bewilderment-the kind you never expect to see in adults, and certainly not in a character who has, by all accounts, endured just about everything. Kimberley Elise, as Sethe's sullen, honey-voiced daughter Denver is equally good, if not better. When Paul D (Danny Glover), Sethe's brother-in-law from the old plantation, reappears, the three attempt to forge out a "normal" family life. But return and reminiscence sets in motion the mysterious appearance of a squawking, drooling beast of a girl-part Linda Blair, part roly-eyed calf-who undermines what little they've built. It's hard to watch Thandie Newton's performance, even harder to figure if she's disturbing or just embarrassing, because she ruins every scene she's in. But however unpleasant it is, I'm grateful it's there. Far too much talk of Morrison goes on without ever mentioning that she's a writer of grotesques, that she belongs more along the horror shelves than she does to traditional lit. Mothers setting their sons aflame? Kids flinging other kids to their drowning deaths? That jarring, wholly out-of-place performance is the one thing that articulates the filthy, wholly out-of-place wrongness of Morrison's everyday human things, things that simply must be supernatural, that's how wrong they are.

--Ellen Fox

Full Length Reviews
Beloved
Beloved

Capsule Reviews
Beloved
Beloved

Other Films by Jonathan Demme
Caged Heat
Storefront Hitchcock

Film Vault Suggested Links
A Stranger in the Kingdom
Traveller
Telling Lies in America

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