Crying Freedom

Jonathan Demme's beautiful Beloved

Comments (0) By Ella Taylor Wednesday, Oct 14 1998
...continued from page 1

If Beloved has a fault, it is its length. The movie grows wearyingly repetitive after two of its nearly three hours. And though Demme, perhaps at Winfrey's instigation, has lightened Morrison's ending with uplift, Beloved is a somber story that may not take with audiences black or white. The movie is being heavily marketed as Winfrey's film, perhaps wisely, given that she's such a potent popularizer: Making Morrison's novel an Oprah Book Club pick did far more for its sales than did the author's Pulitzer. If nothing else, Beloved the movie has done the unthinkable in newsstand philosophy - put a black woman on the covers of two major glossies. Time's writer gushed astonishment at how different Winfrey's "deglamourized" performance is from her Oprah persona. What did he expect? Laugh tracks? Slave chic by Armani? Almost: Vogue's puff piece on Oprah was padded (it must be said, with the diva's full cooperation) with "an enchanting tableau vivant" of the three female stars clad in the ball gowns their characters might have worn had they not been slaves: Oprah resplendent in Armani, Elise and Newton in Isaac Mizrahi, which "unexpectedly pairs cotton 'horsehair' with silk satin."

And they say our culture lacks a proper respect for history.

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