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Beloved: From Novel to Movie
Book Author: Toni Morrison Movie Producer: Oprah Winfrey Movie Director: Jonathan Demme Paperback: Plume; ISBN: 0452280621, pp. 275 Hardback: Knopf; ISBN: 037540273X, pp. 322 Reviewer: Clenora Hudson-Weems, Ph.D., University of Missouri-Columbia.
"Enough of that slavery stuff." That was Oprah Winfrey changing the focus. as she continued to do throughout the making of the movie Beloved. with a casual dismissal of slavery in a recent television interview with Rosie O'Donnell, admitting that she spent only one of the three days she planned in the Wilderness in her preparation for the lead role as Sethe. The film is an adaptation of the 1987 Pulitzer prizewinning novel by the 1995 Nobel prize-winning author. Toni Morrison. Oprah's statement, reflecting a careless attitude on her part toward a major and defining aspect of AfricanAmerican life-slavery-sadly represents the mentality of the very people assigned to the serious charge of preserving, interpreting and disseminating the legacy of Black people via the most popular and effective media today-visual imagery, the silver screen.
But the movie itself, far beyond what Oprah has to say about it, poses serious problems. To begin with, the title character, Beloved, who upon her physical arrival at 124 Bluestone Road in the novel, recovers the necessary physical and emotional developmental stages she was denied due to her early death. These stages occur early on in the novel, in less than 25 pages, in fact, as we witness her grow from a sleeping, drooling infant, to a clumsy, wobbling toddler, to a throwing up, sweets-craving child, and ultimately to the eighteen-year-old young lady, the same age she would have been had she lived, complete with making unwise and immature choices as she begins to move on into adulthood, which unfortunately she is unable to realize before her end. In the movie. however, we find the title character trapped in her recovering developmental stages. thereby rendering her seemingly retarded. which seems to suggest that her condition is a result of her horrible death. A distracting distortion of the novel. Beloved's speech in the film never develops beyond...