# Beloved (1998)

### reviewed by
Kleszczewski, Nicholas

    Beloved

I haven't read _Beloved_, but I can see why it was a prize-winning novel. The story is of Sethe, her daughter Denver, and Paul D., who are former slaves being terrorized by a poltergeist. Digging deeper, the "ghost" aspect serves as a complex allegory of the past, and it evokes sentiments of mystery, awe, beauty, and repressed horror.

The film "Beloved" evokes no such sentiment. If ever there were to be a textbook case of a film with noble intentions, a stellar cast, a reputable director, and a stellar Oscar-baiting campaign, doomed, doomed, doomed, due to the miscasting of that single pivotal figure, this is it.

That character is played by Thandie Newton, and her performance is god-awful. She isn't mysterious. She isn't horrifying. She doesn't evoke the central metaphor of repressed emotions of slavery. She evokes the cheese of Roger Corman and Ed Wood, sans charisma.

For example, to evoke terror, she speaks in breathy monotone, shifting her jaw to the right. Scary? Why, it's flat-out hilarious! Gusts of laughter were heard in the screening I attended.

The rest of the cast is in an entirely different league. Oprah Winfrey is good as Sethe, but this is familiar terrain for those who have seen her in _Native Son_. Danny Glover suffices, though he's just playing himself. The real surprise is Kimberly Elise. She's fantastic, in the same way that Natalie Portman and Claire Danes are beyond their years. When she's onscreen, you see her performance abosolutely riveted, filled with resentment and fear, and never enjoying her childhood. Elise's performance was the single reason why I weathered the entirity of the film.

At three hours, the film is too long, and perhaps could do without some scenes of Grandma preaching in the woods. Further, it could have done without the multiple gross-out scenes that have nothing to do with the central theme of slavery. Ants crawling on a young woman? A dog's eye poked out? Oprah urinating? A pregnant naked woman shrieking in public? Still reading this?

Back to the title character. Perhaps the character was so hard to portray that no casting could have sufficed (a possible exception would be the Caucasian Emily Watson, who treaded familiar ground successfully in _Breaking the Waves_). Perhaps it would have been better to underwrite Beloved's character so completely, that all we see is an invisible person, and the family's reaction to her.

My point being, as long as the mysterious Beloved is described with words, she would remain an indelible creation of our own imaginations. But because Jonathan Demme and Oprah had chosen to be explicit in the film's portrayal of the title character, the mystery is gone, and what results is the impossible fusion of the important period piece and a campy horror film. And like oil and water, they just don't mix.

Who was this film made for? Patrons who enjoy campy horror fluff would not want to sit thru a three-hour self-important message film, and the prestigious artsy types would not want any campy gore with their delectable Oscar-bait delight.

_That_ is the reason why this film bombed. It's not that viewers prefer the dumb antics of _The Waterboy_. It's that if we want to laugh at a movie, we want to make sure that the film was _supposed_ to be funny.

    Nick Scale (1 to 10): 5

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