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But none of Morrison's novels had been filmed, and that was fine with her. "I was always annoyed," says the author and Princeton professor, "when my students would ask, 'When is there going to be a movie?' I told them that a novel is not what happens before the movie. Why can't it just be a book?" Morrison knows the page and the screen are only distantly related, especially in the adaptation of a novel like Beloved--dense, elliptical, teeming with allusion and metaphor, leaping from now to then and back again, in pain. Turning a book into a film, Morrison notes, is "an ongoing battle, between the images of language and the images of the image. That's what the creative process is."
Ah, but who can say no to Oprah? Recalls Morrison: "She said, and this is kind of charming, 'I am going in my pocketbook and write a check.' I wasn't talking to a studio or a lawyer but to another human being. If you'll excuse it, it reminded me of myself. A single black woman who said, 'Well, I'm doing this. It's going to be hard for me, but that's beside the point.' This was a big project and, for her, a big deal. And she was deadly serious about every aspect of it."
In late 1996, Winfrey sent LaGravenese's script to Demme. He read it on a Christmas vacation, called Winfrey and asked, "Now what do I have to do?" Finding a director was that simple. Making the movie was harder--not just re-creating Reconstruction-era Cincinnati in today's Philadelphia and Delaware but also finding the crucially right actors for four shifting, demanding roles, in which Glover would be the only other star. Newton, the Anglo-African actress who illuminated Flirting and Jefferson in Paris, came to the first script reading with an early, teasing hint of her character's mannerisms; her regal beauty explains how Beloved can cast a spell over Sethe and her brood. In the role of Baby Suggs, Beah Richards, who 30 years ago won an Oscar nomination for playing Sidney Poitier's mother in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, serves as both Greek chorus and black preacher; her sermons give the film heft and life.
But it is Elise, a University of Minnesota graduate whose only previous feature was the femme-bonding comedy Set It Off, who is the headline find. Her Denver is alert both to the pain of being insufficiently loved and the frail promise life may hold for a young black woman after slavery. By the end of the film her posture has smartened, her smile is knowing; leaving the house, she becomes a freed slave, not unmindful of Sethe but unchained to her. If Beloved is to succeed with viewers, it will be in part because they recognize that the film belongs, eventually, to Elise; she is the hope that can rise from hurt. "Watching her was so gratifying," Morrison says. "Every time she was onscreen I was happy. You know that feeling: 'Oh, she's back.'"
Elise could radiate; Winfrey had to seethe. "On the surface," Demme notes, "Sethe is stoic, immovable, but inside she's an inferno of emotions. Oprah had to find the exact way to communicate both of these things, and it was great theater every day watching her do it. There were times when Oprah the person would be so overwhelmed with compassion and empathy for Sethe the character that her emotions would take her far away from where Sethe needed to be. As Toni Morrison told me, 'Remember, Jonathan, Oprah cries. Sethe doesn't.'"