Highly Overrated But Still Good

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Beloved (1998): Dir: Jonathan Demme / Cast: Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, Hill Harper: Powerful film with a title regarding a girl but it may also reference divine love. Flashbacks showcase brutality of a female black slave who is raped by two white students while their teacher looks on. Her husband is killed after being forced to watch. She becomes pregnant but kills the child to keep it from slavery. Years later her house is haunted by a poltergeist manifested into Beloved. An old friend stops by but he fears the spiritual presence. There is also a daughter named Denver who was delivered by a white woman upon her escape. Jonathan Demme is a suitable director after having made The Silence of the Lambs, also about a scarred past. Oprah Winfrey delivers a powerful performance full of fear, dread and hopelessness. Danny Glover plays her visitor reduced to conviction. He gets her pregnant again and offers to keep her but eventually he will discover her grim past. Kimberly Elise plays Denver, a survivor and perhaps the strongest. Thandie Newton is amazing with her awkward reflexes but the character Beloved is a spiritual wreck. She's a reincarnation yet demonic and completely unreadable. Hill Harper plays Winfrey's husband. Compelling story of gloom with muddled supernatural elements. Score: 6 ½ / 10

After the US Civil War, hard-working Oprah Winfrey (as Sethe) lives in the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio. During flashbacks, we will see her house is haunted by a restless spirit who likes to shake up the set. An uncommon woman, Ms. Winfrey demonstrates supernatural powers of her own when she heals the family dog. Another flashback provides information about the incident which shaped Winfrey's "Sethe" and her life – her sadistic ex-master tried to take her back to the plantation, resulting in Winfrey taking drastic measures to save her children from slavery...Presently, Winfrey lives with her teenage daughter Kimberly Elise (as Denver). Soon, they are joined by another ex-slave from the "Sweet Home" plantation – Danny Glover (as Paul D). The trio becomes a quartet following a fun visit to the carnival and a look at Winfrey squatting to urinate. Winfrey decides to take in weird, but well-dressed waif Thandie Newton (as Beloved, after an insect attack. Introducing herself like the girl from "The Exorcist" (1973), Ms. Newton turns out to be more like a baby in a woman's body. She may also hold the key to Winfrey's soul...Trying to turn Toni Morrison's deservedly acclaimed novel "Beloved" (1987) into a worthy film is an admirable task...The production looks classy, with some beautiful photographed (by Tak Fujimoto) segments; dusty smoke is piped in so some scenes don't look too pretty. "Academy Award" favorite Colleen Atwood was nominated for her costume design. Lisa Gay Hamilton is well cast as a younger Winfrey, but her characterization suffers from the non-linear editing. The strongest, most consistent performer is relative newcomer Kimberly Elise. Granted, she has a less emotionally wrought role to play, but she also plays her "Denver" beautifully and is harder to catch acting than most...This attempt was piloted by Winfrey, a major talk-show host and part-time actress who has since become an unimaginably wealthy media guru. When celebrities sin, they can be forgiven by apologizing to "Oprah" in a face-to-face interview. Winfrey the actress passes muster, here; that the film wasn't perfect shouldn't negate her opening herself up to act more often, and take criticism. What really doesn't work are the supernatural elements; they look better in the book. It might have been interesting to leave out the overtly supernatural and make "Beloved" a straight drama.****** Beloved (10/8/98) Jonathan Demme ~ Oprah Winfrey, Kimberly Elise, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton

Toni Morrison writes complex novels, and Beloved is no exception. Oprah Winfrey tackled the project, and the result is mixed. Although I can't stand her holier than thou attitude, and angel network bulls***,she can act, as she proved in The Color Purple. Here she is Sethe, who, just after the Civil War lives alone with her daughter, Denver, after her sons have run away, due to being frightened away by an angry ghost. An old friend, Paul(Danny Glover) drives the ghost away, and he moves in with Sethe. A beautiful young woman named Beloved(Thandie Newton) wanders into their yard and they take her in. Here is where it gets complicated. Denver finds out that Beloved is Sethe's reincarnated daughter. Beloved puts a spell on Paul and rapes him. Later on, it is revealed that Sethe was assaulted when she was young, and she tried to kill her kids, rather than have them live in slavery. As a movie, it is visually interesting, but the plot is too convoluted for my taste. Thandie Newton is always good, and she was an excellent choice for the lead role. Check her out in Gridlocked.

The adaptation of Toni Morrison's classic novel is momentarily brilliant, but a bit of a mess at times as well.The novel tackles a number of different issues: Motherhood, manhood, race issues and other themes, while being a ghost story taking cues from the Gothic tradition. This presents a number of problems for the would-be director, in this case the often brilliant Jonathan Demme. One of the main issues in turning a Gothic story into a film, is that Gothic stories are inherently ambiguous. The book describes the ghost of Beloved moving things and throwing things around in the house, but it leaves the reader with a sense of not knowing to which degree these things are actually happening. At the end of the novel (spoiler alert), for instance, the reader cannot be quite sure what exactly happens with Beloved, whether she was actually a ghost, etc. This ambiguity does not translate well to the film version, where the viewer actually sees (through crude special effects) Beloved's image flickering and vanishing. This takes a lot of the punch out of the ending for me, and is why I like the realistic elements of the story much more in the film version (Spoiler: For instance when Sethe is found in the shed having killed her daughter, a very powerful scene).It also presents a challenge for the actors, specifically the one playing the ghost returning to haunt the family, which leaves me to my biggest gripe with the film: I did not like Thandie Newton's portrayal of Beloved at all. I don't know what to criticize exactly. Beloved is supposed to look dazed and speak incoherently, but Thandie Newton often comes across as comical rather than frightening, especially in conjunction with the poor special effects, which seem very dated already. She is bizarre, but not haunting in the way that Morrison's character is supposed to be.Viewers who have not read the book might find themselves confused and turned off by what is really a bizarre story that simply does not work as well in the film medium. Viewers who have read it might find it, like me, a film that only rarely captures the essence of Morrison's novel, while losing much of its haunting ambiguity and visceral emotion. There is a lot of sexual depravity, violence and rape in the novel, which has not been emphasized to the same degree in the film, making it less provocative than, in my opinion at least, it should have been.What we're left with is a flawed picture, but not one I would know exactly how to fix.