Beloved (1998)

Hollywood has yet to deliver the movie we so desperately need about slavery, the one that will plunge us, with a force comparable to that of, say, "Schindler's List," into a newly intimate and terrifying contemplation of the obscenity of the African-American holocaust. There are moments in "Beloved," the somberly forbidding, nearly three-hour adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel, in which I imagined what that movie might look like. The film tells the story of a former slave, Sethe (Oprah Winfrey), who is living on a rural plot outside of Cincinnati eight years after the end of the Civil War. Sethe has a teenage daughter, Denver (Kimberly Elise), who resents her mother's past, and, early on, Sethe takes in a boarder as well, an avuncular old friend named Paul D (Danny Glover); a former slave who has been wandering the country since he was freed, he soon becomes her lover. The appearance of domestic stability, though, is the barest of illusions. Sethe's home is haunted by demons -- the film opens with a camera-rocketing exorcistic upheaval -- and she is shadowed by memories of murder and survival during her years at Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation where she grew into womanhood.

Those memories come crashing back in images of occasionally startling power. Just after she'd given birth, Sethe was held down by the master's sons, who grinningly suckled at her breasts. The director, Jonathan Demme, gives us a disquieting shot in which we see this atrocity from Sethe's point of view. "They took my milk," she keeps saying, and the way that Oprah Winfrey delivers that line, with mournful diminuendo, it truly seems an indignity beyond words. Winfrey's performance is full of stoic anger -- her big round eyes stare with defiance, yet, at times, they express a fear, a glint of degradation, we haven't seen in her before. Still, her haunted look can't hold "Beloved" together the way that Morrison's haunted prose did.

A historical passion play fused with gothic family psychodrama, "Beloved," as a movie, is a dense, jangled cataclysm of enigma and outrage. It leaps from the present to the past, from the "tree" scars of a savage whipping to the eerie vision of a ghostly woman-child in black finery emerging from the darkened woods. Although individual moments have ferocity and pull, you're always aware of them as moments. Intense yet amorphous, weighed down by the crushing ponderousness of its vision of slavery as mythical horror, the movie is undeniably a labor of devotion and intelligence, but, in the end, a labor is just what it is.

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