BELOVED

Imagine the late author of ROOTS, Alex Haley, and the master of horror, Stephen King, getting together to write a novel, and you will have some inkling of what self-made millionairess Oprah Winfrey’s film BELOVED is like. Based on the acclaimed novel by Toni Morrison, BELOVED is an exercise in excess, not the least of which is its 171-minute running time. Of course, what would you expect from the director of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and PHILADELPHIA, Jonathan Demme, a melodramatic filmmaker with a flair for disturbing set-pieces that overpower the stories he tells.

The beginning of the movie is not for the squeamish or the easily disturbed. Inside an old house on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio in 1865, a black woman and a young black girl are terrified when their pet dog and other objects fly violently around the room. Gruesomely, the dog is flung against a wall. He slumps onto the floor, one of his eyes hanging out of its socket. Again gruesomely, the black woman calmly fixes the whimpering dog’s injury. The very next scene occurs eight years later. The black woman, named Sethe, played by Oprah Winfrey, is drawing water from an outdoor well next to the haunted house when a black man named Paul D., whom she hasn’t seen for years, appears in her yard. They talk cryptically for a few moments. When Paul enters the house, he sees red nightmare visions, including what appears to be a scene of murdered corpses. More cryptic conversation occurs until Sethe’s daughter Denver appears. Apparently, she was the little girl in the first scene.

Slowly, the movie reveals that 18 years ago, in 1855, there was some kind of disturbance at a slave plantation in Kentucky. There, Sethe, pregnant with Denver, had to run for her life from some dastardly white people. The movie eventually reveals that, shortly after arriving in Ohio, Sethe killed her other three children, and almost killed Denver, to keep them away from the white slaveowners who tracked her down to that house in Ohio.

Early on in the movie, Paul scares away the ghost and begins a love affair with Sethe. By some unknown occult means, however, the ghost, who is really Sethe’s murdered daughter, comes to life as a wild, childlike young woman, who calls herself Beloved. This woman is certainly no beloved, because she uses demonic powers to “force” Sethe’s lover Paul to impregnate her. In the end, the demonically pregnant Beloved must be exorcised by a group of black women brandishing crosses and singing about Jesus.

BELOVED is a disturbing movie, for several reasons. First, instead of jumping right into the frightening, gratuitous and overdone scene with the dog and the unnecessarily cryptic, scary scenes between Sethe, Paul and the unseen ghost, BELOVED should have hinted first at the brutality of the slaveowners and then focused on Sethe’s escape in the woods. Starting with these scenes would have built up more sympathy for Sethe, who seems unconcerned about the demonic spirit haunting her house and hurting her surviving child, Denver. It also would have provided a better, more understandable context for the crucial reunion scenes between Sethe and Paul. It also would have gotten rid of much of the jumping back and forth between 1873 and 1855, which is a purposefully confusing and unnecessary device.

Secondly, the violence, occult images and themes, and nudity in BELOVED are psychologically and spiritually demonic because of their graphic, explicit, intense nature. It is really sad to discover that Oprah Winfrey finds this kind of material so uplifting. Miss Winfrey clearly needs some psychological, spiritual counseling based in the Bible. No amount of perceived social relevance can make up for such anti-family, immoral content.

Thirdly, this movie is socially divisive because, instead of getting rid of the differences between the races, it actually increases them by turning the issue of American slavery into a simplistic melodrama. In BELOVED’s world, the slaveowners are as bad as they possibly can be, and the ex-slaves are, on the whole, as noble and caring as they possibly can be. The horror of American slavery was not that some, or even many, slaves were mistreated. No, the horror of slavery was, in part, the fact that, even if a black person could gain his freedom, that freedom was severely restricted, not only in the southern states but often even more so in the northern states.

Finally, BELOVED is an immoral movie because it expresses a Romantic worldview, in spite of its Christian elements. That worldview preaches an anti-Christian gospel of self-love. In the movie, Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, has become a backwoods preacher who sermonizes in outdoor services. Although Suggs teaches the ex-slaves in Cincinnati to celebrate life, she also teaches them, in the movie’s final scene, a brand of self-esteem that smacks of New Age thinking. Paul also gives a similar message to Sethe in the scene before the last one. Thus, BELOVED seems to be saying, “The Black Woman is essentially good and noble, but civilization (i.e., the white race) corrupts The Black Woman. The Black Woman should be controlled by her heart and emotions, not her intellect.”

Black people are mostly victims in this movie. That is why, in order to maintain their self-respect, Winfrey and Morrison must elevate the Black Woman into an Afro-fascist idol fit for mindless, feminist consumption by the robotic followers of what passes for the civil rights movement today. All in all, BELOVED is one of the worst movies of the year. Only the acting, set design and costuming pushes it above a poor rating.