Beloved (film).
I didn’t even know that they’d made a film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Somehow it’d skipped me, even though it stars Oprah and Danny Glover’s in it and Thandiwe Newton and Kimberly Elise, all people I’ve seen in other movies yet somehow I’d never even heard of this one.
I was warned that it might be bad, and of course, that makes sense: how do you take Toni Morrison with her poetry and her vibes and her art that is very much art over plot — how do you take that and make a film that’s in any way comparable?
And okay, sure, the movie starts off pretty un-promising. We’ve got the house that Beloved is haunting, except how do you show a house haunted by a murdered child, how do you show a house haunted by a murdered child who was killed because her mother would not let her go back into slavery, would rather her be dead — how do you — in Hollywood — convey that convincingly? What do any of us know about it really?
So Danny Glover walks through the haunted house and it’s shaking and it’s red and there might be some haunting music playing and I’m like yeah, this is going to be bad. They are not going to be able to pull this off, but then the past gets layered onto the present all holographic and you see Sethe, you see her making the decision that will be the defining act of her life, but you only see it partially. Danny Glover is trying to understand but he can’t understand — he can’t even see it all the way. He walks carefully through the haunted living room until he’s on the other side of it, back, fully, in the present.
One thing I really like about this film is how the past continually folds itself onto the present. How the movie becomes this physical demonstration of the abstract fact that we are often — at least subconsciously — both here and there. Here because we were there. There, in our minds, looking back. And we can’t help but look back sometimes, even just to make sure that it’s all still behind us.
So there is Beloved, the murdered baby turned woman who walks and talks and thinks like a baby but is—miraculously—in the body she would be in if she had not died. And Thandiwe Newton kills this role — she falls into it completely, and even if the movie is not up to your movie-watching standards, I’d say it’s worth watching just to see her. Her jaw, loose. Her eyes soft and innocent. It seems a role totally separate from the actor and yet fully embodied by her.
She’s a story among stories in this movie, and the stories the characters tell don’t always meet us in the present. Sometimes they transport us to wherever they took place. Now we are there with Sethe, helped by the country White girl, with her as she talks to Paul D while he’s trapped in a bit and as she ultimately—in her fear—makes a decision that the rest of her life can do nothing but orbit around. We’re sent there and then back again, time fluid and flexible, able to run both ways.
Maybe it’s because I’m edging toward 29, but lately I’ve been thinking about my life so far. I was looking through some old pictures when I stumbled across that video of Steve from Blue’s Clues saying we’ve come a long way from back when we were all looking for clues together. He says some of it has been kind of hard but look at us, we’ve made it through. And I know anything I’ve been through is not as intense as a slave-bound-so-murdered baby coming back to haunt the place, but there has been some intensity in my own life now and then. Some things that—as Steve from Blue’s Clues put it—were kind of hard. And I didn’t always envision that I would get past those things. I worried that the past would always slip into my present, turn the house red and shaking. It is good to know that though time can slip both ways, though you can be met with the past as if it were your present, you can also move past things. Like in this film, when Beloved becomes simply the pile of clothes that used to hold her, we can move on. Wake up in the morning breathing today’s air. The days piling up between us and who we used to be.
Image: Touchstone Pictures
Video from Blue’s Clues (all the closure you’ll ever need): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTMIRRpjMc
