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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."