Beloved Directed by Jonathan Demme Starring Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton and Kimberly Elise   A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Bo knows cheesy shows: Derek's back in NBC's surfin' cowboys soap "Wind on Water" Practical Magic Reviewed by Laura Miller Yet another suburban witch story with a wishy-washy moral: A sorceress's place is in the home   R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Movie credits 101 By Robert Glatzer A former film director decodes the in-jokes and ego trips lurking behind that never-ending list of names (10/09/98) What Dreams May Come Reviewed by Laura Miller In the new Robin Williams movie, heaven is a twee B&B (10/09/98) Antz Reviewed by Janelle Brown Woody Allen is the voice of anxious and whiny worker ant "Z" in Dreamworks' charmingly hokey "Antz" (10/02/98) Hit Me Reviewed by Jonathan Lethem In an ominous hotel, a miserable bellhop gets caught in an all-too-familiar web of intrigue and doom (10/02/98) Clay Pigeons Reviewed by Andrew O'Hehir Vince Vaughn is irresistible as the psycho villain in an otherwise empty comedy (10/02/98)   BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

T H E__D E S I G N A T E D M a r t y r Jonathan Demme panders to Toni Morrison's guilt mongering in his brutal adaptation of "Beloved." - - - - - - - - - - - - BY CHARLES TAYLOR | Nothing is as potentially destructive to a filmmaker than the praised wrong turn -- particularly when, as in the case of Jonathan Demme, the filmmaker's gifts are comic, casual, funky. Demme's comedies, "Citizen's Band," "Melvin and Howard," "Married to the Mob" and his masterpiece, "Something Wild," were populated by dreamers and eccentrics and crackpots. They took place in a world of gas stations, convenience stores, diners, Vegas wedding chapels and high-school reunions. His characters shopped at Kmart, ate at lunch counters or fast-food joints, and everywhere they went, they were accompanied by a soundtrack of pop music, a national crazy-quilt symphony to which everyone added their own distinct sound: Truckers listened to Dave Dudley on their long hauls, Jamaican waitresses grooved to reggae, hipsters dug the coolest new bands, Mafiosi snapped their fingers to piano-lounge singers. Demme's movies were a party where bohos and working-class folks, stockbrokers and hitchhikers all kicked up their heels together and discovered what they had in common. He looked at the mass culture usually dismissed as trashy and lowbrow and fell in love with the people who made their homes there. His affectionate and satirical approach said that this was the place to find our greatest national vitality and originality. It was the truest, flakiest vision of the nutty energy of American life that anyone had put on the screen since Preston Sturges. And it all fell apart with "The Silence of the Lambs." Instead of treating Thomas Harris' preposterous and engrossing pulp as the spookhouse melodrama it was, Demme adapted the book as if it were a serious study of The Darkness That Lurks Within Us All. His sense of humor was nowhere in evidence (Anthony Hopkins seemed to have snuck in the hammiest parts of his performance when the director wasn't looking). In interviews given at the time, Demme talked about making the movie as if his purpose were to earnestly examine society's violence toward women. Reviews praising Demme's new maturity followed, as did Oscars. Demme's follow-up, "Philadelphia," didn't even have the craft that made "Silence" watchable. It was a tolerance lesson so intent on making a statement that it lost track of the lawsuit story that was its narrative engine. Now Demme has made his biggest, most prestige-laden film yet, directing Oprah Winfrey in her longtime dream project, an adaptation of Toni Morrison's much-praised novel "Beloved." Morrison's novel is not the type of material a filmmaker turns to in an attempt to regain humor or spontaneity. And befitting his new status as an acclaimed Oscar-winning director, Demme has approached it in the manner that has become de rigueur when talking about Toni Morrison -- with bowed head and bended knee, incense burning. The most lauded of Morrison's novels, "Beloved" is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave living free in the Ohio of the 1870s and '80s with her daughter Denver and Paul D., who was also a slave at Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation Sethe fled. Her two sons have been driven off by the ghost that haunts Sethe's house, the spirit of their other sister, whose throat was cut when she was a toddler by their mother because Sethe believed her former master had come to reclaim her and take her children into bondage. The household is visited by a mysterious young woman named Beloved, the grown manifestation of Sethe's murdered child and -- more to the point -- a manifestation of her survivor's guilt. When Morrison's name comes up, even usually perspicacious critics start in with the hosannas. John Leonard, on the paperback edition of "Beloved," exclaims: "I can't imagine American literature without it!" Actually, I can't imagine Morrison without American literature. Her faux-Faulknerian interior prose is just the most obvious of her borrowings. In "Beloved" she also adds stilted attempts at magical realism, soggy folklorish interludes replete with soggy folklorish wisdom ("More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize"), a horror story and periodic outbursts of gruesome melodrama used as illustrations in Morrison's hectoring lecture on the bloodiest sin on America's racist soul. The self-consciously elevated language of the passage below might induce giggles if it appeared in a romance novel: Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. There was something blessed in his manner ... Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other: that way past the Change of Life, desire in them had suddenly become enormous, greedy, more savage than when they were fifteen, and that it embarrassed them and made them sad. But Morrison is nothing if not canny. Brandishing the fact of slavery and playing on America's collective shame, Morrison has cowed her would-be critics. We know that horrors as bad or worse than any she describes actually happened. (Morrison's inspiration for Sethe was an escaped slave named Margaret Garner, who is the subject of Steven Weisburger's new book, "Modern Medea.") But this is history as bludgeon, perfectly captured by the novel's dedication: "Sixty Million and more," (the figure denoting the Africans who died on the middle passage). As Stanley Crouch pointed out in his withering essay on the book, 60 is 10 times six. In Morrison, we are dealing with a writer who measures suffering by numbers. N E X T_P A G E _| A grisly opening scene