Beloved Reviews

A searing story of slavery's perpetual chains, Jonathan Demme's thoroughly respectable adaptation of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel will disappoint the book's admirers, even though it's nothing if not faithful: Many of the film's highlights come directly from the book. In 1873, former slave Sethe (Oprah Winfrey) and her daughter Denver (Kimberly Elise) live just outside Cincinnati, shunned by their neighbors. Sethe's adolescent sons have long since fled, terrified of the supernatural force that thrashes around in their home; gone too is her beneficent mother-in-law, Baby Suggs (Beah Richards), a self-styled preacher who exhorted her flock of former slaves, "Love your flesh, for out there they do not love your flesh." The arrival of Paul D (Danny Glover), another survivor of Sweet Home, the farm where Sethe, Baby Suggs, and Sethe's husband Halle lived before the Civil War, sets off a chain of events that disinter the scarcely buried past in all its pain and bitterness, embodied in the ghost of the daughter Sethe murdered rather than see returned to slavery. Soon after Paul D's arrival, a strange girl named Beloved (Thandie Newton) wanders into Sethe's yard, casting an eerie spell over the fragile family. There are many love stories here, and ghosts and dark unspoken desires, but Demme's film conveys little of the novel's sublime terror in the face of overwhelming history and emotion. Several scenes verge on evoking the novel's uncanny atmosphere, but by and large the film remains stubbornly earthbound. In trying to make the movie conform to conventional rules of storytelling, the rich reflections on memory, desire and history that Morrison weaves subtly into the characters' thoughts are largely discarded in favor of showing external reality. How incongruous to complain that Demme and his cast reject easy, Spielbergian emotional button-pushing: They've achieved something that's genuinely extraordinary, which should satisfy Oprah's numerous fans. But they've taken material with the power to insinuate itself directly into the realm of the imagination, and made it strangely inert and lifeless.