(4 of 5)
Through a tough course of suppression and revelation, Winfrey finally got it right. This isn't a gimmick performance; it is genuine acting, and it abrades nicely against the more ingratiating characters in the ensemble. Her work will be called brave, but really it's canny; Oprah becoming the anti-Oprah will win deserved praise. Off camera, though, she was totally Oprah. Demme tells of an electrician on the crew who was in a deep depression over a family crisis. Winfrey, who didn't know the circumstances but could tell something was wrong, went to the man and hugged him. He later told Demme that he found Winfrey's words wonderfully healing.
Morrison had attended the first read-through--what she calls "stroke-the-author time"--and visited the set, where she fell in love with the costume people and their meticulous work. "The fabrics they had!" she exclaims. "They had boots from Italy with the buttons up the side. And the underclothes with six inches of lace on the skirts, the likes of which you have not seen. How many people had been blinded making these things?"
Now that the movie was made, Morrison had to see it. On first viewing, she inevitably compared it to the drama she had dreamed up, the landscape she'd devised. "Was this the house? Was this the yard? Is this the way the stairway looked?" Well, no: "The house I had in mind was much more elegant, more middle class, because it had belonged to an upper-middle-class white abolitionist family. Their version downscaled it."
She realizes that she is speaking like a protective mother--like Sethe speaking of Beloved. "The movie I'd have done would have taken about a day. Which is why I never would participate in the movie in any way, except to shoot my mouth off. I think moviemakers ought to do the work they do and I should do the work I do." It took three viewings to provide Morrison with the distance she needed to get near it. "And I found myself mesmerized by looking at the story, not thinking it, but looking at it."
And responding to it. "There's a moment," she says, "when you see Sethe's mother in the hanging scene. You see her eyes. To see that come alive was breathtaking." She was finally pleased and surprised by the achievement. "They did something I thought they never could: to make the film represent not the abstraction of slavery but the individuals, the domestic qualities and consequences of it."
There are viewers, sympathetic ones, who will find Beloved more admirable than involving. The focus on stern Sethe and her closed fist of a heart may put audiences at a distance; and 174 minutes is a lot of time to spend with four troubled souls moseying toward inevitability. But the popularity of pizazzy Hollywood melodrama should not mean that the only movie pace is four-on-the-floor frantic. Beloved has a pulse that beats slower because the hearts of its characters are heavier; but that pulse is evidence of complex people sifting through the ashes of a national tragedy, trying to find meaning and a reason to hope.