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.

BELOVED | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - That's the approach Demme has bought into in this film. He's out to show us more of the torment of slavery, and more of the torment of the souls who survived, than anyone ever has. The film opens with a grisly whammy: the spirit haunting Sethe's house slamming her dog into the walls until the poor creature lies whimpering with a broken leg and one eye dangling from its socket. A movie can't recover from an opening like that. With almost three hours left to go, the audience, knowing that worse things are sure to come, is already cowering in its seats, distrustfully. (Unlike the audience at "Saving Private Ryan," which accepts the Omaha Beach sequence because the movie's subject is war. What does showing a helpless animal brutalized have to do with slavery?) But "Beloved" isn't about anything so simple as engaging an audience. It's about punishing us, rubbing our noses in the dirty truth until we have no choice but to validate the suffering of the characters. Of course, that sort of dehumanization cuts two ways, not just brutalizing the audience but making the characters less people than repositories of suffering. Sethe and Paul D. and Denver and Beloved are nothing more than the sum of the violence done to them, the designated martyrs meant to represent those 60 million and more. The flashbacks to the atrocities Sethe witnessed and endured at Sweet Home are presented to us in the manner of horror-movie shock cuts. They're invasive, heated up, coming at you without warning. Here's the young Sethe witnessing her mother being hanged. Here's what Sethe sees (the scene is shot from her point of view) as white men rape her and force the milk meant for her child from her breasts. Demme's presentation wouldn't be out of place in the cheapest exploitation picture, though there at least, the director might be honest about their purpose. These scenes aren't tragic climaxes included to intensify our emotions; they exist to shock us. They don't add anything to our understanding of the characters because they have taken the place of characterization. If they tell us anything, it's that victimization confers saintliness on the victimized. Melodrama isn't inherently exploitative, and perhaps there's a good movie to be made of "Beloved" by treating it as melodrama. But that would mean unifying it as a story, which neither Demme nor his scenarists, Akosua Busia, Richard LaGravenese and Adam Brooks, all of them in the grip of reverence, have seen fit to do. When the movie isn't hitting us over the head, it's spooning out the material to us like broth to an invalid, drop by flavorless drop. The excruciating pace mirrors the sluggishness of Morrison's sonorous prose (my favorite justification for how uninvolving the movie is comes from Time's Richard Corliss, who claims that the slowness reflects the heaviness of the characters' souls). But at least that prose unifies the book. Rendered in strictly narrative terms, the catch-all nature of the material becomes apparent. "Beloved" hopscotches from ghost story (complete with furniture and crockery flying through the air, as if Mulder and Scully were about to drop by and investigate) to the lukewarm love story between Sethe and Paul D. (Danny Glover) to the story of the young, pregnant Sethe (Lisa Gay Hamilton, of "The Practice") making her way to Ohio to the appearance of the mysterious Beloved (Thandie Newton), none of it with any narrative drive, compelling emotion or often even sense. There's no way of telling who we're seeing when Beloved first emerges from the depths of a lake and, covered in ladybugs, swoons against a tree. No telling why Sethe, upon seeing Beloved in her front yard (still bedecked in those damn ladybugs), runs around to the back of her house in apparent fright and pisses a mighty stream considering she doesn't realize Beloved's identity until later. No telling why Beloved almost immediately becomes a permanent member of the household, and why Glover's Paul D. is the only one who sees how creepy she is. (Sethe is too busy being a good Samaritan, and Denver, played by Kimberly Elise, is happy to have an adopted sister.) Nothing is more inexplicable here than Newton's performance, which is one of the most appalling I've ever seen from a professional actor. It's understandable that an actor might run into difficulties playing a literary device, a ghost who embodies her mother's guilt over committing infanticide. What isn't understandable is why Newton has chosen to play Beloved as a simpleton. (Morrison didn't write the character that way.) Every time you look at Newton here, she's acting up a storm, staring into space, drooling, smearing food around her face and talking so that the half-chewed bits fall out, letting her tongue loll into the side of her mouth and then speaking in a voice that sounds uncannily like the character of Crazy Guggenheim from the old Jackie Gleason show. The performance is an ungodly collection of physical tics and vocal mannerisms meant to astonish us with their combination of technique and rawness. To be fair, though, nobody is this bad without help. I would have sworn that as brilliant an actor's director as Demme would have been incapable of allowing an actor to make such a spectacle of herself. But Demme doesn't appear to be interested in directing actors here. Taking his cues from Morrison, he instead assigns them their designated symbolic function. So Winfrey, whom I was looking forward to seeing in a leading role after her terrific supporting performances in "The Color Purple" and the atrocious film of "Native Son," is stuck playing Noble Black Pride. You don't get to see any of the kidding quality that occasionally breaks through the therapeutic tone of her show, none of what Camille Paglia once called the vamping back and forth between two voices. The effects she goes for here -- pronouncing "wasn't" as "wadn't" in a moment of anger -- are self-conscious. Some of the cast manage to create real characters out of the moth-eaten cloth they have to work with, like Carol Jean Lewis as Janey, the housekeeper who gets Denver work, and, as Denver, Elise, who settles down in the film's final hour and offers the relief of seeing one person whose motives and behavior are comprehensible. The best performance is Beah Richards' as Sethe's mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. Though stuck with the movie's lumpy homilies ("yonder, they do not love our flesh"), Richards is the only actor on screen who seems entirely believable in the setting, as if she'd sunk her limbs and spirit down into her ramshackle house while everyone around her is playing a prestigious game of dress-up. Everywhere you look in "Beloved" are signs of Demme's decay as a director -- the inattention to performances, the grindingly slow pacing, the sloppy, at times incoherent, story line and the straining grandiloquence of the tone. Nearly all of the directorial choices are showy, distracting, like the floating effect of Tak Fujimoto's hand-held camera and the style in which he and Demme shoot the flashbacks, using a grainy film stock and then overexposing it so it looks overbright, bleached out. Nothing is more alarming, though, than the way Demme assents to every one of Morrison's bad ideas. Demme translates the novel's post-feminist idealization of female bonding into scenes of grown women acting like children, squealing over games of tag or festooning their house and themselves in ribbon. As in the book, we are being called on to be witnesses here to the effects of America's holocaust. That's why Demme shoots many of the conversations so that each character is looking directly into the camera and addressing us. But it's crucial to the way "Beloved" (both novel and movie) works that we are witnesses who are not allowed to make judgments. The linchpin is the scene where Sethe reveals to Paul D. how she attempted to kill her children when she thought they were about to be taken into slavery. In flashback, we see the younger Sethe standing amid the bloodied bodies of her children. The scene is garish (the movie might be called "Sethe's Choice"), but it also strikes me as psychologically unassailable. Sethe's action plays like one of the horrible things people can be driven to in outrageous straits. What's offensive about the scene is the moral certainty -- the utter absence of doubt or self-reproach -- in the way Sethe justifies the murder of her daughter. You can't judge me, she tells Paul D., because you weren't in my shoes, and your condemnation means nothing because I've been through worse. The movie doesn't dispute that arrogantly myopic reasoning. If "Beloved" didn't have its origin in a novel written by a black woman, Demme's movie might seem a disjointed and over-the-top white fantasy about the suffering of black folks and their strange, healing folk ways. Odd things happen in black households, the movie seems to say, powerful forces the rest of us can't understand. But thank goodness the black community knows how to take care of its own. There is a separatism to "Beloved" that's depressing coming from a director whose previous films showed an embracing, integrationist spirit (and I don't just mean racially). Nothing in "Beloved" moved me as much as the black faces Demme quietly but deliberately included throughout "Something Wild." The presence of those people was an unmistakable rebuke to the ethos of the Reagan era, with its narrow ideas about who constituted America. In his essay on "Beloved," Stanley Crouch quotes Morrison at the 1986 PEN Congress saying she has never considered herself an American. That's far too limited a sensibility for a director whose films have shown such an expansive, mischievous and joyous notion of who could be considered American. SALON | Oct. 16, 1998