BY MARGARET A. McGURK
The Cincinnati Enquirer
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Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover star in 'Beloved'.
(Touchstone Pictures)
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CHICAGO -- On June 24, Oprah Winfrey and Jonathan Demme showed Beloved at Showcase Cinemas in Bond Hill.
The 200 people in the audience, most of them African-Americans,were the first regular moviegoers to see the nearly three-hour epic based on Toni Morrison's novel. The film opens nationwide Friday. "That was our virgin audience in Cincinnati and we did that on purpose," Ms. Winfrey said.
She discussed the screening for the first time during an interview here, her home base, where the Disney studio had invited film critics to see the movie and meet the cast.
"I love the Cincinnati audience. We were redeemed by the Cincinnati audience. The big question in our minds was "Can you get it if you haven't read the book? . . . And they did, they got it."
Though filmed in Philadelphia and Maryland, the movie is set chiefly in Cincinnati of the 1850s and '60s. The story of Sethe, a former slave haunted by her dead daughter, borrows from the history of Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave from Kentucky who attacked her four children with a knife when faced with imminent capture.
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Kimberly Elise, left, and Thandie Newton are the other women at the center of 'Beloved'.
(Touchstone Pictures)
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Ms. Winfrey, who co-produced and starred in the film, said she chose Cincinnati for its first test screening because, "I thought it was a full circle moment. . . . Margaret Garner, I thought I owed it to her (and) all the ancestors."
She said she approached the screening full of confidence that the test viewers would embrace the film; Mr. Demme, whose directing credit include Philadelphia and Silence of the Lambs, was not so composed.
"Jonathan was a wreck, a nervous wreck, all the way there," she recalled. "He said, "This is our baby; it's the first time we're showing it to a real audience, and it's our baby, and suppose they don't love her?' "
In the car to the theater from the Cincinnatian Hotel, where the film party, including other producers, editors and studio executives, had gathered, Ms. Winfrey took Mr. Demme's hand and said, "Look out the window. . . . What do you see? What's out the window? Look through the trees."
In a moment, he said, "It's the Ohio River!"
Ms. Winfrey said she responded, "We've come to Ohio, Cincinnati, Margaret Garner's home, and there's the Ohio River. And you're worried?"
Inside the theater, Ms. Winfrey sat in the back near the door, where she was painfully aware of every person who left for a drink or a bathroom break. She said she had to crush her impulse to follow them out and drag them back to their seats for critical moments in the movie.
The first lesson she learned from the experience was, "It's a different movie with an audience." In particular, "An African-American audience is like no other," she said, in its willingness to talk to the characters on the screen and to "hoot and holler and cheer.
"What I sensed from the audience was that America needed to be prepared for this film," she said.
"What I later tried to explain to everybody else over and over again was, nobody has ever seen a film like this, nobody. Not even black people in Cincinnati, from Cincinnati, descendants of the slaves in Cincinnati -- still, nobody's ever seen a film like this. "
Everything in our psychological, theatrical history that has shown us black people in period costumes leaves us with a stereotypical image" that the makers of Beloved pointedly avoided.
There are, she noted, no fiddles, no banjos, no dialect and no head rags in Beloved.
The absence of familiar cues is itself a signal of the movie's ambitions, she said. "I want people to come in knowing . . . that this is serious and engaging and you're going to be drawn in and you need to be settled down.
"You have to spoon-feed yourself and then leave room for digestion. . . . It resonates with you. . . . All of that is on purpose," she said. "Every leaf falling, every little fox running, all of that is layered as part of the texture and makeup of the film."
She said her favorite comment on the movie came from a woman in the preview audience who followed her out to the parking lot afterward to deliver this assessment: "Deep, girl. Deep!"
Mr. Demme echoed her assessment. "I accept that this is a very demanding movie," he said. "It breaks endless rules. It has a pace that we're completely unaccustomed to in the movies. It doesn't have any of the usual signposts. . . . It raises issues that it then doesn't bother to deal with."
Still, he said he trusts audiences to appreciate the film.
"There's something really thrilling about the unexpected in movies. And I know that's what we have to offer."
Even the setting, he said, diverges from the routine.
"We've seen a lot of movies in that time period. But they've almost always been out West or in the Deep South," he said. "So the whole idea of doing something in the Ohio region is fresh movie terrain.
"Every director wants to make a Western at some point in their career. . . . This became mine. It's a Midwestern. But there it is: It's farms and countryside and horses and wagons and people with rifles. I loved going into that era."
Surrounded by talent
The film, made for about $60 million, boasts a cast that includes Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Beah Richards, Albert Hall and Irma P. Hall and a crew full of Academy Award nominees and winners. For Mr. Demme, that meant stepping back and letting the talent fly.
"It's that inarguable equation that the more gifted people you work with, the better the movie's going to be," he said.
He said he counts Beloved a success, even before it undergoes the box-office acid test, thanks to the skill of the company and the depth of the story.
"I love this movie so much," he said. "I feel like it's such a big, deep movie that comes from such a big, deep book and is the creation of so many different gifted people that I feel like a fly on the wall a little bit. I don't have the kind of proprietorial feeling that I've had before at the end of making a movie.
"The making of the movie was one of the most magnificent two years of my life -- the privilege of getting to focus in on what this movie's about, enacted by the people in the cast.
"I don't want to say I don't care what happens to it, but if we tank abysmally, if we go right down the tubes and nobody wants to come see our movie about our characters, I still will get such joy from the making of this damn thing. It's amazing."
Fueled by emotion
The key actors -- Ms. Winfrey, Mr. Glover, Ms. Newton, Ms. Elise and Ms. Hamilton -- uniformly reported that filming took a heavy emotional toll, since the story delves into harrowing territory, including memories of slavery, death and loss.
Yet Mr. Demme said the nearly two years he spent on the project were "an emotionally delirious time for me."
But, he admitted, "I forget the grueling experience that the actors themselves had . . . in order to enact this stuff. It's easy for me to say we all had a joyful experience. I got to watch these great performances while they're spilling their guts out.
"But it was the easiest movie I've ever made."
Ms. Winfrey saved some of her highest praise for Mr. Demme. She said he treated even the extras with unusual thoughtfulness.
"I felt this about Jonathan: I came back and started my Angel Network as a result of working for Jonathan," she said. "Because what Jonathan does is he makes you want to open your heart a little wider. I think I'm a really nice person, but I get around him and I think, now there's a nice person."
Facing the past
The experience of sharing psychic space with Margaret Garner brought Ms. Winfrey face to face with the spiritual legacy of those who survived slavery and those who chose death in freedom over life in bondage. For a woman whose syndicated talk show -- recently extended for at least three more years -- made her one of the wealthiest celebrities in America and gave her the unique clout to bring Beloved to the screen, playing the role of Sethe was a long look into an old mirror.
"I live in that space now knowing that I come from that. That gives me strength that you can't even define it in words," she said. "Those are the kind of choices they were faced with. I'm faced with "Shall I continue with this multimillion-dollar talk show or not?' What kind of decision is that? That's part of my reason for continuing. How dare me think, "Oh, I'm tired?'
"I just felt like I should take what has happened in the past, my collective past, and use that to continue to launch myself."
What's next for Oprah?
What exactly she will launch herself into next she cannot say.
She said she is offered many scripts, most of them second-rate. "All this gratuitous violence stuff, nobody-knows-the-trouble-I-seen scripts . . . or gun-toting kinda hip-hop lawyer mama. No, thank you."
With a production company of her own, she has the wherewithal to hunt for better stories to tell. She owns the movie rights to other novels, including Ms. Morrison's Paradise.
But she said she does not worry about locking down her future. "What I try to do is open myself to the work. Life is about trying to become more of yourself, not about deciding what do to next.
"When you got all your bills paid, when you have acquired all of the stuff and things, you realize it is just stuff and things. If you haven't filled up yourself, you're just as lonely as you were without the stuff and things.
"This season I've been stronger, better, more exhilarated than ever. Because I feel like I'm on course, on purpose. Just dead on purpose. I don't do anything I don't want to do," she said.
"I feel whole, I feel full, I feel big. . . . That just happened to me in my 40s when I stopped trying to please everybody else and do what everybody else wanted to do.
"Even with Beloved, when people were saying "I don't think you're the one. I don't think you can do it. I don't see it. You should give the script to me.' That's a big decision to say, "Well, I'm going to try.' "
For all the talent in and behind the film, the prestige of the novel and Ms. Winfrey's own fame, Beloved is a gamble.
"It is," she admitted. "But I'm bettin' on myself. I'm bettin' on every voice, every name from that slave ledger that I used to read that never dreamed that this day could be possible but now knows it's here. I'm betting on them. I'm betting that the time has come."
Margaret A. McGurk is Enquirer film critic. Write her at 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202; fax to (513) 768-8330; e-mail: mmcgurk@enquirer.com.
Tragic story borrows from Margaret Garner
Cincinnati recreated in Philly
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