Film Review: Beloved

Beloved is at the outset, a ghost story and the focus of the story must remain there. Yes, there are scenes of slavery, whippings, lynching, and aggravated torture in all their inhuman infamy. The stories of pre and post emancipation cruelty will cause even the most hardened cynic to wince, twisting uncomfortably in one’s seat. Beloved is not entertainment in the standard sense yet it is not quite a documentary either. Beloved falls somewhere between witnessing an execution and watching a child rescued from a well – you would probably observe both in horror, but would not care to see the well or the execution ever again. The set up for the film is fairly simple, sarcastically unbelievable, and laced with enough facts to demonstrate the film’s true goal, that being what racial injustice will cause a person to do. The ‘do’ in this case is both right and wrong and the film clearly allows you to make up your own mind about what is just and what is not.

Oparah’s character, Sethe escapes pregnant with her babies in tow, from a plantation euphemistically called ‘Sweet Home’. A hard taskmaster there called ‘Schoolteacher’ hunts down the escaped Sethe to claim his property, her babies. She escapes to Ohio with the help of a naive white girl and a river shipper who takes her to her grandmother, Baby Suggs(Beah Richards) to await the husband she jumped the broom with. There are some riveting truths laced into the fabric of this movie. In one scene, Sethe laments to Glover that she’s been taken(sexually) many times by many men, all the time knowing that she had no right to her own body, but, she proclaims, her husband, Halle(Hill Harper, He Got Game) is the only man she put her arms around while she was being taken.

While Oparah and Glover have top billing and will most likely be discussed in the same breath with Oscar, it is this critics opinion that come March of 1999, Miss Thandie Newton will carry away the statuette. Thandie Newton has only done a few films (Gridlock’d, Jefferson in Paris) and gives such a strong performance in this flick that I believe she will be the next Halle Berry in terms of her grace, beauty, and screen presence. Her acting ability will rank her with superstars like Ingrid Bergman, Helen Hunt, and Jodie Foster. She’s simply phenomenal and worth the price of admission all by herself. Newton absolutely sizzles and pops as she portrays Beloved, the mother murdered child of Sethe. At first she occupies the home Sethe lives in as an apparition, and tantrum throwing poltergeist. After a ghostly confrontation with Glover’s character, Paul D, she disappears as a ghost only to be replaced months later by a mysterious stranger who shows up at Sethe’s doorstep where she is taken in and helped. Beloved moves in and befriends Sethe’s surviving daughter, Denver(Kimberly Elise), who is miserable, tortured, and hollow as she had no friends and is never allowed to leave the grounds by Sethe. Watch the range of emotion and demeanor Ms. Newton projects. In dozen or so scenes, her face is horribly contorted by an unrelenting agony of the pain of abandonment, and frustration at her inability to communicate, to the next moment of sublime sweet peace with her family gathered around her. And in that moment of peace, her face is so beautiful, so fragile, so lovely, you’d think it was sculptured by God. She’s simply stunning and her performance will hardly be ignored by Hollywood who has already cast her in the lead role for the upcoming sequel to Mission Impossible.

The story progresses well with noticeable tension between Glover and Newton. Suspecting his ambivalence, Beloved sets her mission to drive him away and after using an ages old technique, succeeds in driving him away where upon she sets in to destroy Sethe’s sanity as benign retribution for being killed as a child. At the core of this movie is an abiding moral question; is there ever such a thing as justifiable homicide? Would any expectant mother caught in Hitler’s Auchwitz allow her baby to be born to such a life? But what about the right of the new baby? Doesn’t each new life have the right to live? Does the mother’s foreknowledge of life to come for her baby justify a mother’s preemptive strike on behalf of her offspring? Beloved is story of post birth abortion because it’s cause is often today’s reason for pre birth abortion, that being, what the mother thinks is best for her defenseless baby.

The film also dramatically demonstrates culture of the period. If whites and blacks are walking on the sidewalk, we see blacks involuntarily step into the muddy street to make way for the whites. We see the "tree" as it was called, the marks left by the whip on the backs of the ex slaves. We see tender moments of romance where two ex slaves comfort each other by gently massaging each other’s "tree". We see the glee in the eyes of white spectators, children and adult alike, as they watch freshly lynched blacks sporadically jerk as they swing from the stout limbs of trees.

The cinematography by Tak Fujimoto is exquisite, dark, and revealing. The movie laces a large number of flashback scenes by using a different film that shows up very grainy with just enough contrast for the movie goer to know that it’s not happening in real time while not distracting from the continuity of the story. There is no soundtrack and that too is fitting. I can think of no music that would adequately embellish the film as it’s power is the sole province of the enchanted performances of the cast.

I recommend the film because it is historically important. Like What Dreams May Come, this is not a touchy feel good movie. You should see Beloved once and even with it's 3 hour run time, moves well enough to keep you engaged between the squirming, misery, and redemption. I do not suggest that children see Beloved. The ghost undertones will frighten even some adults. No, not like The Exorcist, but it will cause you to have second thoughts and a few sleepless moments alone. I wish I could say more. Beloved is the most difficult film I’ve ever had to review.