The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 103

dlD(0)(fll Dos 'Beloved' stars. Jonathan Demme's film features Fine acting by the cast helps make the film worth seeing By Jay Boyar SENTINEL MOVIE CRITIC hould Oprah quit her day job? I After watching Be loved, I'm tempted to say yes. Although I have reservations about the film as a whole, I'm a big fan of its star. If the Queen of Talk can act as sensitively as she does in this much-anticipated picture, why is she still messing around with that little afternoon gabfest? Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Beloved is a ghost story about the horrifying legacy of black slavery in the United States. In this film, the unnatural institution of slavery becomes a supernatural force that continues to haunt its victims even after abolition.

One of those victims is Sethe, Winfrey's character, a former slave who lives in a modest home near the Cincinnati of 1873. With her is Denver, her surly adolescent daughter, and the sad, sometimes-violent ghost of Sethe's other daughter, who died in infancy. It doesn't take much to send this ghost into a table-shoving, plate-tossing frenzy. The angry, young spirit is particularly incensed by the unexpected arrival of the handsome, gentle-spirited Paul (Danny Glover), who knew Sethe 18 years earlier, when they were in bondage together on the Sweet Home plantation. Soon after Paul's arrival, someone else shows up, a strange Glover young woman who calls herself Beloved.

Sethe and Denver immediately take this mysterious person into their family, although she makes Paul who has become Sethe's lover uneasy. As things turn out, his instincts are reliable: Beloved could have been called Bede-. viled. I tS Thandie Newton, Kimberly and utterly demented. If Winfrey has a shot at a second Oscar nomination, Newton may actually win the prize.

Kimberly Elise (Set It Off) plays the reclusive Denver with an appropriate wariness while Beah Richards (who received an Oscar nomination for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) portrays the charismatic preacher Baby Suggs with a liberating sweetness of spirit. One of the film's highlights, in fact, is the mesmerizing sequence in which Baby Suggs exhorts the men in her congregation to dance and the women to weep. The combination of her gently commanding tone and the dreamlike, bathed-in-pale-yellow visuals makes the passage memorably eerie. Although Winfrey is hardly alone up there on the screen, her individual acting achievement cannot be dismissed. Her weakness is as a producer of this film.

At the core of Beloved is a horror tale with one heck of a wallop. It cries out for a swift, creepy treatment. In fact, this material presents the unusual case of a literary adaptation that should have contained less of the book. But someone and I'm guessing Winfrey, who has labored a decade on this project has chosen to treat Morrison's story reverentially and luxuriantly, REVIEW 'Beloved' Cast: Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, Beah Richards, Lisa Gay Hamilton. Director: Jonathan Demme.

Screenwriters: Akosua Busia, Richard LaGrave-nese, Adam Brooks. Clnematographer: Tak Fuji-moto. Music: Rachel Portman. Running time: 2 hours, 52 minutes. Industry rating: (restricted).

Parents' guide: Adult situations, violence, nudity. Reviewing key: excellent good average poor awful With Anger. It's wonderful to see this unaffected actor taking off from a script (by Akosua Busia, Richard LaGravenese and Adam Brooks) that allows him to build a role with depth and variety. As the strange and demanding Beloved, Thandie Newton Jefferson in Paris) is, in turn, innocent, disturbing, luminous TOUCHSTONE PICTURES Elise and Oprah Winfrey. stretching it out over two hours and 52 minutes.

That's a regrettable decision but, considering the author's daunting reputation, perhaps an inevitable one. A recent Time cover story compares the film to Ibsen, Chekhov and O'Neill and says that Winfrey told one of the screenwriters that she views Beloved as her Schindler's List. Actually, it's more like her Philadelphia fairly well-done but not all it could have been. Had Winfrey, instead, thought of Beloved as her Silence of the Lambs, it might have been a masterpiece. Still, enough of the power of the central horror story remains to hold the movie together.

So am I recommending Beloved? With reservations, yes. But not because going to see a film on an "important" subject is some sort of obligation like paying your taxes or eating your broccoli. I can't tell you how much I detest that "Junior League" school of criticism. Besides, Beloved is praiseworthy on humbler, more personal grounds. If you are drawn to the sub-.

ject and if you are willing to put up with a certain slackness in exchange for a haunting tale, some stunning imagery and a whole lot of very fine acting join the club. That, of course, would be Oprah's Movie Club. The character of Beloved isn't the only mystery that this movie presents. Another is how Winfrey, after years of TV overexposure, has maintained enough focus and allure as a actress to turn in a performance that can stand beside her Oscar-nominated work in 1985's The Color Purple. As the quietly fierce Sethe, she holds the screen and our hearts without overplaying or appearing to court sympathy.

The quality that may come off as narcissism on the small screen functions here only as confidence, enabling her to take the emotional risks that her role demands. Winfrey owes a lot to director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia), who is peerless when it comes to working with actors. In Beloved, he seems to have structured the scenes to showcase what Winfrey does best to emphasize Sethe's strength and suppleness. It adds to Winfrey's performance that some of her character's most demanding scenes take place in flashbacks, where Sethe is played by the affecting younger actress Lisa Gay Hamilton. It also helps that the rest of the supporting cast is extraordinary.

As Paul, Glover does some of his best and most complex work in years since 1990's To Sleep.