Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: February is Black History Month, so we’re looking back on great performances by Black actors that the Academy Awards ignored.
Beloved (1998)
In 1998, Jonathan Demme was on an Oscar hot streak, especially when it came to actors. His most recent dramatic feature, Philadelphia (1993), had given Tom Hanks the first of two consecutive Best Actor statuettes. Prior to that, The Silence Of The Lambs (1991) took home Best Actor and Best Actress, along with Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay. Even the relatively lightweight Married To The Mob (1988) had secured a Supporting Actor nomination for Dean Stockwell. And there was no reason to think that was about to change, since Demme’s latest project was as prestigious as they come: a three-hour adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning novel Beloved, starring Oprah Winfrey—in her first major big-screen role since receiving an Oscar nomination for 1985’s The Color Purple—as well as perpetually overlooked titan Danny Glover and exciting young talent Thandie Newton. AMPAS’ history with recognizing Black actors wasn’t stellar, but surely voters couldn’t ignore a pedigree like this, especially with a (white) Academy favorite at the helm.
They could and did. Beloved garnered respectful but not exactly glowing reviews (at a time when there were few professional film critics of color), tanked at the box office, and wound up receiving just a single Oscar nomination, for Colleen Atwood’s costume design. Watch it today, however, and you’ll wonder how it’s possible that nobody saw fit to honor one of that year’s most quietly astonishing performances, given by the least famous (today, at least) of its four stars. Kimberly Elise plays Denver, the 18-year-old daughter of former slave Sethe (Winfrey); the year is 1873, and these two women have found a measure of peace, if you ignore the poltergeist that haunts their ramshackle house outside of Cincinnati. “What kind of evil you got in here?” asks a horrified Paul D (Glover), the first time he sets foot inside. “It ain’t evil,” Sethe replies. “Just sad.” Shortly thereafter, a mysterious, barely ambulatory young woman (Newton) shows up outside, croaking “Beloved” when asked her name. The makeshift family—Sethe and Paul D, who’d been enslaved together in Kentucky, become lovers—takes Beloved in, unaware of the secret she harbors.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Denver seems to immediately, instinctively know who Beloved is, rushing to her aid when she appears and insisting that this exceedingly feeble and bizarrely childlike woman is not sick. And while Winfrey and (especially) Newton have much more demonstrative and traditionally award-grabbing roles, it’s Elise’s largely silent intensity throughout that holds Beloved together. Denver’s simultaneously fearful and giddy reaction to the poltergeist’s attack on Paul D, right at the beginning of the movie, sets the tone for a character who symbolically straddles the line between an inescapably nightmarish past and a tentatively hopeful future. Elise was at least 30 years old at the time, but she perfectly embodies a confused, wary teenager, and subtly conveys everything from crippling agoraphobia to growing self-determination with just her gaze and her body language, radiating raw emotion from dim corners of the frame without actively stealing focus.
Morrison’s novel is such a crazily harrowing portrait of slavery’s lingering trauma that no filmmaker might have been able to do it full justice. Demme did shepherd yet another Oscar-worthy turn, though, even if nobody noticed.
Availability: Beloved is currently available for digital rental and/or purchase via Amazon, Google Play, Apple, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango Now, DirecTV, and VUDU.
16 Comments
Agreed. I remember thinking the movie didn’t really, or entirely, work, because some things that worked on the page didn’t when made literal on the screen, but Kimberly Elise’s performance is the thing that stuck with me the most. She was tremendous. I also thought Lisa Gay Hamilton didn’t get enough acclaim as the younger version of Oprah’s character. I don’t want to describe the moments in case I’m misremembering, but Elise and Hamilton each have a (separate) moment that are the main things I remember—hopefully accurately—whenever I’m reminded of this movie.
Honestly, both this and Color Purple were just mediocre Oscar bait. I hated the novel so much though it might have biased me against Beloved from the start.
Wow, what is it like to just be that level of wrong? Fascinating.
Bad class, bad instructor. And just because I didn’t like it, doesn’t make it bad obviously. Much prefer Alice Walker.
I fully agree with him on the movie. 100%.
As someone who also bounced off of Beloved not liking it much, I do think its worth reading some other Morrison stuff. Paradise, in particular, I think is great.
This is a stunningly bad take. Do you think stories about Black women, or Black people in general, historically did well at the Oscars in the last century? (Note: they didn’t. Only two Black actresses had even won Oscars prior to this century.) Yet you think making a movie about the type of people who didn’t win Oscars in the kind of story that didn’t win Oscars was “Oscar bait”? Does that really make sense to you?
You want to talk Oscar bait? That’s the year Saving Private Ryan came out, and was both nominated for and won a bunch of Oscars. (White men! In war! Bein’ sad! Now THAT was Oscar bait.)
Both were Spielberg, who was massively wrong for Color Purple. And, yes, a prestige director,prestige cast and big budget adaptation of a literary work is 100% ALWAYS Oscar Bait. You can toss Driving Miss Daisy in there as well. Color Purple especially deserved someone with a more subtle touch than Spielberg who screwed up Amisted as well.
Interesting how AVC has very different takes on Jonathan Demme flicks today.
It’s almost like different movies with different plots and different executions receive different criticisms.
I prefer to rate movies based on the color in their title. The Color Purple and Purple Rain score an A-. Blue is the Warmest Color, My Blue Heaven, and Blue Valentine all come in with a solid B. Red, Red Sparrow, and Red Dawn (original, not remake) All get a C.
I don’t think Beloved totally worked as a film. I’m not sure it can fully work as a film, but it did also get a lot more flack than it probably deserved as well.I do think it’s a film that could benefit from a remake with a Nia Dacosta or Ana DuVernay at the helm.
It’s an interesting conversation, and it’s been too long since I’ve seen it, but I remember thinking of this movie as a really good adaptation. It’s a difficult novel in more ways than one, and they grappled with that rather than making any particular moves (that I can recall) to water it down one way or another.
I think it might be the complexity of the piece. Not that this adaptation was bad by any means, but it’s also a very 90’s, Oscar bait approach to filmmaking. It visually looks like the Color Purple in terms of color palette and approach, but it was also shot in a very conventional thriller/horror way – lots of sudden zooms and dutch angles to make you feel off center.I’d almost like to see it as a limited series. While Beloved isn’t overtly horror by any means, I think some of the things the Haunting of Hill House and the Haunting of Bly Manor in terms of atmosphere and tone could benefit it. I think in 2021, we also have more outlets and more audiences ready for a slow burn, weird (for lack of a better word) story.
I don’t think it’s a failed adaptation and I don’t know that there truly is a better option in terms of the plot – maybe it’s not meant to be a film – but it’s one for me that I would like to see someone else take a stab at it and I think there are some BIPOC filmmakers that could do some cool things with it. I have high hopes for Nia DaCosta’s Candyman remake and the trailer makes me wonder what she could do with Beloved.
This movie is tantamount to getting screeched at for two fucking hours. It’s the epitome of an unfilmable novel. The character works as a metaphor when you’re reading, but when you actually see it unfolding in front of you, the whole thing seems ridiculous, not to mention relentlessly histrionic. When it was over, I felt the way you do when somebody finally turns off a lawn mower.
Kimberly Elise isn’t white famous but she is very much black famous. Hugely so.