Winfrey Successful, Again

by Tom Jolliffe

To many folks, Oprah Winfrey is the decade’s premiere heroine; an inimitable paragon of ambition and good nature. While her television talk-show has not always been above the regrettable subjects for which daytime programming is so notorious, the decency of its host is a saving grace. In that milieu, only Geraldo Rivera approaches Oprah’s sincerity, and none touch her empathy. With her various dimensions of character and ability, Oprah remains fresh in the public view.

Enter Jonathan Demme’s film Beloved, the stirring runaway-slave drama adapted from Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In taking the role of Sethe, a woman who helped her family escape an oppressive Kentucky plantation, Winfrey shows the social and historical cognizance she evinced in The Color Purple and Native Son.

The film begins with a startling glimpse of supernatural mayhem in Sethe’s Ohio house. After two sons flee, Sethe remains steadfast in the haunted Ohio home with her daughter Denver (Kimberly Elise); she refuses to run yet once more in their life. When old friend Paul D. (Danny Glover) takes up with them, the spectral activity ends — and new phenomena of sorts begin. A mysterious, awkward young woman appears in front of the house — she calls herself Beloved. In caring for their recuperating guest, Sethe and Denver grow fond of the spirit-like, erratic Beloved (Thandie Newton), despite a lasting uncertainty surrounding the girl’s origin. It is within this framework that the controversy about her “too-thick” love, and the true nature of Beloved, are revealed.

The cinematic realization of Morrison’s book has been on co-producer Winfrey’s agenda for over a decade, and she has been unswerving in her commitment to portray Beloved’s protagonist. Without falling prey to hyperbole, it may be said that Winfrey’s performance more than rises to the occasion.

Beloved plays out in a series of flashbacks illustrating Sethe’s passage to Ohio and the “first twenty-eight days of freedom” enjoyed at Bluestone Street. These four weeks of utopian self-sufficiency for Sethe, her mother-in-law Baby Suggs (Beah Richards), and her two little girls and boys are golden-hued, rich recollections. Some of Beloved’s most moving scenes are the memories of enigmatic Baby Suggs leading the village folks in woodland spiritual sessions; these images of overdue liberty and group solidarity touch the quick. The twenty-ninth day, however, is a different story. When the Kentucky plantation owners from the “Sweet Home” catch up with Sethe and her family, the filmgoer witnesses one of the more dreadfully moving scenes in recent memory, Saving Private Ryan included. The consequences of the twenty-ninth day’s action form the meat of the movie, such that divulging the content here would be ruinous.

The themes at heart of Beloved are overdue for the contemporary American scene. That which transpires on the twenty-ninth day is revolting, but raises into relief the notion of that fading virtue, Responsibility. Sethe’s commitment to her family is something literally awesome, even if her modus operandi is bloodcurdling. In Sethe we see courage, as well as a certain matter-of-fact sensibility. The supernatural is treated here as a condition to be faced, not fled from. When the family dog loses its eyes to the spirit’s malevolent thrashing, Sethe finds them again and replaces them in their sockets.

In building themselves a life following the inhumanity of the plantation, people like Sethe and Paul D. faced an enormous task. On paper, their lot improved, but when we account for their indelible memories and the discrimination facing them, their new life was hardly easy. It would be a century before their ancestors could begin to assume their natural and equal station in life, but the first postbellum African-Americans were determined to give their life meaning through faith and sacrifice. With Demme as her deft director, Winfrey has given us an important glimpse of this grinding condition in Beloved. MR

This article was published in the 28 October 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 17, Number 3).
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