Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [181]
With Beloved, she planned to recast the story of slavery in America in all its hell and heroism. “We got it all wrong,” she said of the history books. “For years we’ve talked about the physicality of slavery—who did what and who invented that. But the real legacy lies in the strength and courage to survive.”
She wanted nothing less than to change America’s consciousness with her film, and to heal racial wounds. “I understand a lot of what that conflict is about,” she said. “It’s about people truly not understanding one another. Once you understand, come to know people and have a knowledge of their hearts, the color of their skin means nothing to you.”
During his second term in office, President Bill Clinton had called for a “national conversation on race,” and Oprah felt the president would have done well to have chosen her to lead that conversation. “He should’ve,” she told USA Weekend. “I know how to talk to people.… Everything is about imagery. We’re people who respond to imagery. You need to see something different so you can feel something different.”
She felt that her production of Beloved would provide the needed differential. “I just want this movie to be received in the way that I truly think it should be,” she said. “I want people to be moved and disturbed by the power of Sethe. If that can happen, I’ll be satisfied for a very long time.”
When the film came out, the critics were moved but, disturbingly to Oprah, in the wrong direction. Most found her film too long, too confusing, and overwrought, and her acting less than star-making. The New York Times’s Janet Maslin said she was not “an intuitive actress”; The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann said she was merely “competent”; and Commonweal’s Richard Alleva dismissed her as “surprisingly dim.” But her good friend Roger Ebert, the film critic, said she gave “a brave deep performance,” and Time’s Richard Corliss agreed. “This isn’t a gimmick performance; it is genuine acting.” Even Toni Morrison, who worried about Oprah’s ability to contain her oozing emotions, was impressed. “As soon as I saw her I smiled to myself, because I did not think of the brand name,” said Morrison. “She looked like Sethe. She inhabited the role.” But the public did not want to see Oprah as Sethe and watch her water breaking, or see her breast milk stolen by “mossy-toothed” white men, or her slitting the throat of her baby girl. In a perceptive column for the Chicago Sun-Times Mary A. Mitchell, herself an African American, summed up why:
Who are these kinds of movies supposed to appeal to anyway? Are black people supposed to enjoy being reminded that they were once chattel and treated like animals? Are whites supposed to empathize with such a fate and leave the theater more sensitive to its legacy? How many of us really, when swept into a sea of guilt, humiliation and anger, call it a good time? A documentary that guides us there is one thing. A star-studded cast is another. Unless you’re a masochist, pain is not entertaining. If only these movies fostered a deeper understanding between the races, they would be worth the agony. But that is hardly the case.
Beloved was released on October 16, 1998, with one of the most expensive ($30 million), media-saturating publicity campaigns ever accorded a film—and perhaps that was part of the problem. To some people Oprah appeared to be promoting