Beloved
Alleva, Richard
o judge the film Beloved as a self-suffident work of art is impossible. Even someone who hasn't read the Toni Morrison novel may sense that what's on screen is misshaped, that important...
...Even someone who hasn't read the Toni Morrison novel may sense that what's on screen is misshaped, that important narrative material has been dropped or sloppily conveyed, that colorful details have been blown out of proportion...
...Many themes are here, explored perhaps in depth in the novel, but only skimmed on screen...
...But Demme slathers on his effects...
...Perhaps the campaign to spread Christianity across the world is nothing more than arrogant cultural imperialism...
...sex used as a weapon (first by slave owners on slaves, then by Beloved as a take-over bid...
...The answers may be on the page, but they're not up there on the screen or on the soundtrack...
...It's a mess made out of mush...
...Did the director, aware of the wildness of the supernatural scenes, want to make the intimate ones as hushed as possible for the sake of contrast and relief...
...Is this what you say to a woman who has lost three of her children, killed One of them herself, and been forced into earthly hell by a semi-demonic spirit...
...Caught in seventeenth-century Japan during the savage persecution of Christians, Father Rodrigues feels his faith wavering when no miracles answer human pain...
...Why is there evil in Commonweal 2 0 November20, 1998...
...Hours: Tuesday- Friday: 1 O-6...
...We see ghosts only when her words allow us to and, even then, only within the context of normal human activity...
...On the outskirts of Cincinnati in the 1870s, the house of an ex-slave, Sethe (Winfrey), is being haunted...
...But Zia's Cincinnati projects the hum and bustle of a real, growing city where life will continue long past the final credits...
...A wide variety of thoughtfully selected titles, including: THE LIFE OF THOMAS MORE - - Ackroyd THE WORD EMBODIED n Kavanaugh SABBATICAL JOURNEY - - Nouwen ADVENT, CHRISTMAS, AND EPIPHANY - - McKenna Prompt, careful attention to your phone and gift orders...
...Morrison has created an ambivalent figure, loving but smothering, righteous but guilt-stricken...
...And yet in Silence, Steven Dietz's stage adaptation of Shusaku Endo's novel, the sea, with its brutal indifference to human life, begins to signal a kind of silence to a devastated young missionary...
...I was inspired to do this movie when I read that very scene...
...Much of the talk between Sethe and Paul D. is about their past, yet not much of it is drawn with vividness or even clarity, except the physical brutalities of whipping and lynching...
...Arriving in the coastal region near Nagasaki, Rodrigues and his partner, Garrpe (Torrey Hanson), find that the authorities are rooting out surreptitious Christianity by forcing local villagers to trample upon plaques of Christ and the Virgin...
...One hears the voice of Oprah (hoarse from script conferences carried on into the wee hours of morning) pleading that a scene not be cut because, dammit...
...As the Grand Inquisitor-like interpreter (Yukihiro Yoshida in the Subaru production) batters Rodrigues with relentless temptation and argument, the Jesuit's confidence crumbles...
...Watching those two films, you may have marveled at the meticulousness of the settings, but also sensed the presence of a strike crew just off camera, ready to demolish everything once the shooting stopped...
...Thandie Newton, as Beloved, achieves the grotesquery of her role but never its pathos...
...When a sort of ladies' aid society marches over to Sethe's house to exorcise it, the fine line between ludicrousness and grandeur is deftly negotiated...
...Why was the slave owner called "Schoolteacher...
...The Theater Company Subaru production of Silence, which traveled to several American cities in October, was an agonizing study of belief and the limits of human certainty...
...The spirit behaves like an angry poltergeist, drives Sethe's sons away but forms a truce with her daughter, Denver, who then withdraws from the world...
...There is also good work by designer Kristi Zia and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto...
...Perhaps we could adjust ourselves to slower, more meditative rhythms if the script weren't so smudgy...
...Visa & MasterCard accepted...
...Her exhortation to them to express their joy doesn't need verbal richness because Richards so poignantly reaches for the words she needs that the ache for eloquence is moving enough...
...The rumor, and the reports of the cruel oppression of Japanese Christians, only strengthen Rodrigues's eagerness for his own mission to the country...
...If so, his solution backfired...
...Toni Morrison deployed and controlled the ghostly elements of her story with her powerful and flexible prose style...
...The lighting effects recall science fiction thrillers like The Fly or Stargate, and they come on so strong and so soon that they put us in the wrong frame of mind for the subtle Commonweal | 8 November20, 1998 human relationships that follow...
...Kimberly Elise is at first hampered by the monotony of playing a girl who so completely withholds herself, but when Denver emerges from her Commonweal | 9 November20, 1998 emotional chrysalis, Elise projects candor and the discovery of inner strength beautifully...
...Fujimoto is the least color-infatuated cameraman now working in this country, and most of his work (Melvin and Howard, The Silence of the Lambs) dwells in one's memory as black-and-white rather than Technicolor...
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...Why couldn't Sethe and her husband reunite after slavery was abolished...
...But Glover has a tendency toward clotted speech and, trying to harmonize with Winfrey's low-level intensity, he often becomes inaudible...
...One somehow hears the fingers of beleaguered scriptwriters shuffling through hundreds of Pulitzerprize winning pages, and the squeak of magic markers yellowing vital passages and crossing out others not so vital and then writing "stet...
...And one hears other equally hoarse but smaller voices warning that, if we do include that passage then we have to keep the following one, too, because both sections depend on each other, but we're looking at a script that's an hour too long already a n d . . , so forth...
...over the latter when it's decided that they are vital after all...
...When director Jack Clayton made The Innocents, his adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, he measured his shocks out in small doses so we wouldn't miss the struggle going on within his heroine...
...The intimate moments are muffled by underplaying less subtle than enervated...
...Perhaps influenced by the "magic realism" of South American writers, the novelist uses gothic horror as an inroad to the abiding horrors of slavery...
...W ost people would not associate the quality of silence with the sea...
...By such means military authorities more or less eliminated Japanese Christianity during the seventeenthcentury's first sixty years...
...Those who refuse are killed or imprisoned...
...Her language says boo!, then her language calms us down...
...The Morrison story is a genre-stretching work...
...When an old friend, Paul D., becomes Sethe's live-in lover and faces down the poltergeist, the spirit incarnates itself as a lovely but seemingly retarded adolescent girl who calls herself Beloved and takes over the household by befriending Denver and The Paraclete Book Center 146 East 74th Street, New Yolk, New York 10021 More than 45 years of service to our customers throughout the world...
...In scenes that bounce thematically off the gospel story, and that frequently pose scenes of death against the backdrop of the sea, Silence wrestles with the notion of certainty...
...But horror on screen is both more immediately shocking and more combustible than literary spookiness...
...Perhaps his own zeal, his fervent endorsement of martyrdom, are forms of hardheartedness...
...But after that, Beloved suffers still another lapse...
...the religiosity of American blacks, feeding off Southern Protestantism but taking on a unique life of its own...
...The play's trajectory is launched from an apostasy, as the assured young Jesuit Rodrigues (Lee E. Ernst) hears that his former teacher has renounced Christianity while working as a missionary in Japan...
...I'm not echoing show-biz gossip...
...Was Paul D. in love with Sethe decades ago...
...Oprah Winfrey proved her talent a decade ago with her excellent work in The Color Purple, but as Sethe she's surprisingly dim...
...I must also note that in the final halfhour of this 185-minute movie, Jonathan Demme finally breaks through to the combination of off-beat humor, generosity, and suspense that distinguishes his finest work (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild...
...Beloved isn't just a mess...
...When the faithful are suffering for God's sake, Rodrigues begins to wonder, why does God refuse to grant them, if not help, then at least a sign of his presence...
...The re-creation of the Cincinnati of 1873 is a far finer achievement than the pre-Civil War Connecticut in Amistad or the turn-of-the-century New York of Milos Foreman's Ragt/me...
...This movie exudes desperation...
...To list a few: the scars of slavery unhealed by freedom...
...A boon, perhaps, but also a trap that the director Jonathan Demme and his collaborators walked right into...
...Winfrey's relative blandness doesn't capture this...
...Saturday: 1 0 - 5 Call us toll-free: 888/311-8949 _9 Phone: 212/535-4050 _9 Fax: 212/535-4052 _9 E-maih para@cybernex.net www: http://www2.cybernex.net/~ para/public/ seducing Paul D. Eventually it's revealed that Beloved is the daughter Sethe killed almost twenty years before in order to preserve her from the horrors of slavery when an old master came to reclaim his runaway slaves...
...Trying to raise Sethe's spirits after another traumatic loss, Paul D. tells her, "You are your own best thing" and "Love your heart...
...When they are captured, the two priests confront the same test, the price of their refusal being the torture and murder of the converts they have ministered to...
...What were the relations between him and Sethe...
...Best of all is the great veteran actress Beau Richards as a village elder who nurtures the spirits of the newly self-liberated slaves...
...For instance, what was Sethe's husband like...
...No matter how good Sethe is, a glint of the demoniac must be seen in her eyes, for, as Denver later points out, Beloved may be not just a ghost but a manifestation of part of Sethe's psyche...
...the "thick love" (Sethe's phrase) of a mother who so desperately wants to protect her children from a brutal world that she turns herself into a Medea...
...And isn't it a boon to the filmmakers that Morrison explores these themes within the framework of a ghost story, for haven't the movies always thrived on the horror and allure of the supernatural...
...Physically and temperamentally, Danny Glover is perfectly cast as Paul D. because no one portrays sane men of middle sensuality better than this actor...
...between him and Paul D...
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...Here he achieves a sort of brownbleached-to-yellow look that is perfect for both the realistic and the supernatural scenes...
...The play's harrowing conclusion shows Rodrigues and his colleague answering these questions in opposite ways...
...The very first scene of the poltergeist's attack, with a dog slammed so hard against a wall that its eye pops out, is straight from Exorcist territory, and so are the early appearances of Beloved, skin acrawl with insects, speaking at first in a basso profundo, later in babyish prattle...
...His solidity is the only thing that has kept the Lethal Weapon series from turning completely loony...
...Or maybe they are on the latter but I just couldn't hear them...
...Though dramatically stiff and rhythmically choppy, the play, which was performed by Japanese and American actors (and co-directed by Joseph Hanreddy and Ganshi Murata) delivered confrontations so profound and immediate that aesthetics seemed to fade into the background...
Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 20
