Beloved
Short description
Set in Ohio in the years after the Civil War, Beloved centres on Sethe, a woman who escaped slavery and now lives with her daughter Denver in a house marked by a troubled past. When Paul D, a man she knew from the plantation, arrives and settles in with them, a young woman calling herself Beloved appears and is taken into the household, and her presence stirs up long-suppressed memories.
The film is an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. Jonathan Demme directed, working from a screenplay by Richard LaGravenese, Adam Brooks and Akosua Busia, and it was produced by Demme, Edward Saxon and Oprah Winfrey, who also stars as Sethe. Danny Glover plays Paul D, with Kimberly Elise as Denver and Thandiwe Newton as Beloved, alongside LisaGay Hamilton and Beah Richards. The film runs 172 minutes. It was the tenth of the fourteen features Demme directed, following Philadelphia and preceding The Truth About Charlie.
The production had a budget of about 80 million dollars and returned roughly 23 million worldwide, a wide gap between its cost and its theatrical earnings. On IMDb it holds 6.1 out of 10 from around 10,000 votes, and on TMDB 5.8 from 112 votes, while the critics' rating stands at 7.8 from 127 reviews, noticeably higher than the audience scores on both sites.
What's left behind the scenes
- Preparing for the role of a slave, Oprah Winfrey participated in a 24-hour simulation during which she was bound, blindfolded, and left alone in the woods.
- To a certain extent, Toni Morrison described real events in her novel. Margaret Garner was a slave on a farm in Kentucky. Her owner was Archibald K. Gaines, who was apparently her half-brother and the father of two of her children. In January 1856, Margaret, her husband Robert Garner, and their four children crossed a frozen river to her uncle Joe Kite’s house near Cincinnati. When they were caught, Margaret Garner attempted to kill her children, but only to prevent them from being taken back into slavery. She only managed to kill her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife before being subdued. The trial in Cincinnati did not take place for four weeks because the prosecution insisted that she be tried for violating federal fugitive slave laws (which had been passed by the US Congress in 1793 and 1850), while the defense insisted on a murder trial under state laws. (By insisting on this, the defense hoped for a pardon from the governor of Ohio if the defendant were found guilty.) By the time the court ruled that she should be tried for violating the federal fugitive slave laws, Margaret’s owner had already taken her back to Kentucky. To prevent her from falling into the hands of Ohio abolitionists (adherents of the movement to abolish slavery and liberate slaves), Gaines sent Margaret to New Orleans and then transported her to a plantation in Mississippi, where she died of typhoid fever in 1858.
- A mansion was specially built for the filming, and after the film crew left, many park visitors mistakenly believed the abandoned set was an old estate.
- There was no snow during the filming of the movie, so the winter scenes had to be shot using artificial snow, plastic icicles, and crushed ice, and all of this had to be cleared from the fields after filming was completed.
- Oprah Winfrey acquired the rights to Toni Morrison’s (1931-2019) novel of the same name, published in 1987, immediately upon its release. According to her, she immediately envisioned herself and Danny Glover in the roles of the characters, but it took ten years to bring the novel to the screen, and she personally oversaw the production.
- Bee Richards’ (1920-2000) health deteriorated so seriously during filming that she had to be given pure oxygen to breathe between takes.
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