87. Beloved
Filled
with some of the most extraordinary images of recent years, Jonathan Demme’s Beloved was apparently too powerful for
audiences to handle back in 1998. Producer-star Oprah Winfrey delivers a
strong-willed and richly complex performance as escaped slave Sethe, a free
woman who survived the brutality of a Kentucky plantation and now lives free in
her ghost-infested home. Preserving her secrets, and keeping her surviving
daughter Denver (Kimberly Elise) under lock and key, she welcomes former slave
Paul D. (Danny Glover) into her home as well as a mysterious, child-like woman
named Beloved (Thandie Newton), who may be the lingering spirit of Sethe’s
murdered child.
There’s
substantial and vital social drama in this 3-hour epic, but Demme and
cinematographer Tak Fujimoto keep Beloved
mystical, spiritual, and emotional. Their stunning, full-on close-ups of
actors’ faces are not only expressive, they convey the weight of guilt upon
these former slaves attempting to move beyond their past horrors and their
present strife. When those faces break into smiles, Beloved earns the beauty of
fleeting joys and sought adoration.
Set against the backdrop of a
house and yard cut off from the road, and infused with glistening flashbacks of
rich, oversaturated memories (the gathering for prayer; the slaying of a child;
the birth of a baby girl), Beloved is
filled with visual cues that represent something richer: the fullness of one’s
life experience. There’s also lingering pain, mostly found in Thandie Newton’s
weird shock-performance as Beloved, a freaky girl first seen covered in
ladybugs and croaking in anger/agony. Accompanied by a hot red light when she
enforces herself upon her newfound family, she smashes through domesticity and
confronts the survivors of slavery with what they had to endure, what they
still endure, and what they can’t ignore. Accused of being hyperbolic and too
serious, Beloved should be praised
for treating its subject matter with unflinching temerity and oft-profound visual grace. (Jeremiah Kipp)
