Word: morrisons
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Thin love ain't no love at all," says Sethe, the fiercely defiant runaway slave in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Oprah Winfrey's love for the book was thick, warm, abiding. With eyewitness immediacy and the God's-eye view of fictive art, Morrison brought the intimate evil of slavery to life in the story of a mother's ultimate sacrifice. When Winfrey discovered the novel upon its publication in 1987, she was moved as a reader, as an African American, as a woman who suffered the death of the child she gave birth to when...
...Oscar nomination for her first movie part, in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. For more than a decade she has dominated the afternoon airwaves with her syndicated talk show. She is among the nation's most admired and influential people. Now, 11 years after first reading the Morrison novel, here she is as the producer of what she told screenwriter Richard LaGravenese would be "my Schindler's List": a pristine, potent distillation of Beloved, which opens Oct. 16. And there she is onscreen as Sethe. Or rather--and here's a sweet jolt--there is Sethe onscreen, with Oprah...
Winfrey is barely recognizable, not because she uses putty or prostheses but because she has deglamourized herself and renounced the oozing empathy of her TV stardom. "As soon as I saw her I smiled to myself," Morrison says, "because I did not think of the brand name. She looked like Sethe. She inhabited the role...
...Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Demme, in working with screenwriter Adam Brooks on the final version of LaGravenese's script, found himself looking back further. "The more we focused in on 124 Bluestone Road, the more I thought, 'This is Ibsen, this is Chekhov, this is Morrison...
However it is slimmed down, and although its conclusion holds more hope than the book's, the movie is certainly Morrison. Says Demme: "Almost everything, every line of dialogue, every article of clothing, every detail we shamelessly took from the book to put in the movie. If Toni Morrison said black dress, it was going to be a black dress. We were slavish," he adds, without apparent irony. The film is also attentive to the change of seasons in the year of the story's life; the surrounding woods and streams are limned in lustrous imagery. But the whole picture...