Bewitching Beloved

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 she was 14; for Oprah, Beloved was a central fable of her race and sex. She knew she had to produce a movie version, though she was new at that job. And though she had appeared in only two films at the time, she meant to cast herself in the lead role. "I think I can play Sethe," she told Morrison. "And if I can't, I'll learn how."

What Oprah wants, Oprah gets. She has, after all, earned an 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 living, hiding inside her.

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."

Under the bold, sensitive direction of Jonathan Demme, Winfrey's Sethe is a creature as stern as she is strong--as much oak as flesh and blood. She moves with the heaviness of someone dragging large and fatal memories behind her like a full steamer trunk. She is, as the book puts it, "iron-eyed"; her gaze is an Old Testament judgment, her love a demon that can crush those it enfolds. The actress and the character share intelligence and passion, but in many particulars Sethe is the anti-Oprah. If Sethe were a talk-show host, she would stare down her guests and say, "You think you've had troubles..."

Now imagine how Jerry Springer would herald her performance: Oprah makes love with a naked Danny Glover! Oprah squats and urinates! Oprah as Sethe: Victim or murderer? The story is based on the true case of Margaret Garner, a renegade slave who tried to kill her children rather than allow them to be returned to the plantation from which she had escaped. In the novel, Sethe is pursued by the spirit of the one child, Beloved, who died at her hand. But the film is really about the things we do for love, about the fatal consequences of moral strength, about the need to hold on to what we've given up for lost or dead.