Breaking the Rules for ‘Beloved’

The irony of Jonathan Demme directing “Beloved,” the film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel, is that it came about by coincidence.

As far back as the mid-1980s, Demme was scouting around for a movie project that dealt with race. Demme chiefly was known back then as the director of quirky and well-made comedies that reveled in offbeat Americana. His reputation since has soared with works that were so expertly crafted (“Silence of the Lambs”), and so poignant and brave (“Philadelphia”), that he rose to the first rank of American directors. All the while, he was quietly searching for his movie about race.

Oprah Winfrey was trying to get “Beloved” off the ground at the same time. But when she sent Demme the script, he says she had no idea it would dovetail with his longtime interests. “It was a dream come true,” he says now of the opportunity.

The process of making the film, however, was far from easy.

“Beloved,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1988, is a densely written novel that deals with the aftermath and legacy of slavery. In poetic prose that fuses down-in-the-dirt reality with symbolism and the supernatural, the book centers on Sethe, a former slave, as she struggles with her daughter, her lover and a mysterious young woman known as Beloved to overcome physical and psychic scars left by slavery.

Period films are always difficult. But adapting this one was made tougher by the way the novel combines elements of several genres into a work that refuses to be pinned down. The filmmakers had to extract a slice of “Beloved’s” epic story line from the tangle of flashbacks, interior monologues and shifting points of view that obscures it.

“There are probably at least a dozen levels that the book operates on,” says Demme, 54. But he called the book’s difficulty “part of the excitement. That was the challenge.”

“Beloved” sprawls, pitches and swerves as it transgresses genre boundaries on its way to achieving an aching kind of beauty. While watching it, a viewer may long for a little more of the discipline Demme imposed on “Philadelphia” and “Silence of the Lambs,” but if he had done that, “Beloved” would not be what it is--a brave if flawed tour de force, a bravura performance by a man who, based on his past movies, might have seemed an unlikely choice as director.

The sly humor and oddball style of Demme’s earlier work in films such as “Melvin and Howard,” “Something Wild” and “Married to the Mob” is hard to discern in his recent harder-edged films. In “Beloved,” all notions of what constitutes “a film by Jonathan Demme” are obliterated.

“Oprah said, ‘There ain’t never been a movie like this before,’ ” Demme recalls with a laugh. “I feel that’s true. That doesn’t mean it’s what’s good about the movie, but it is a fact about it.”

Making the film would have been even tougher than it already was had he known more about the book’s history. A large portion of the African American intelligentsia so treasures Morrison and “Beloved” that a literary controversy erupted in 1988 after she failed to win the National Book Award. Forty-eight writers and academics published a letter of protest in the New York Times that praised Morrison’s work while deploring the “oversight and harmful whimsy” that had denied her the recognition they felt she was due. Morrison went on to win both the Pulitzer for “Beloved” and the Nobel Prize for her body of work.

Given that history of protectiveness, and given the mind-set that persists in some quarters that African American history should only be interpreted by African Americans, Demme’s first and perhaps greatest act of bravery was merely signing on to direct the film.

“I’m really glad I had no idea of that,” he says of the 1988 controversy. “Adapting the book was intimidating enough as it was.”

As for a white man directing a work about African Americans, he says it was never a concern. “Probably eight or nine years ago it might have had the potential to be problematic,” he says. “But that was before the wonderful proliferation of black filmmakers and more African American subject matter being dealt with in films.

“I do feel that as a human being we all have a lot more in common than the race and gender things we use to entrap each other,” he says. “I have no difficulty relating to, feeling empathy with and deeply sympathizing with people of different races and different genders.”

In the 1980s, when films featuring African American themes were relatively rare, Demme tried in vain to launch several projects. “I sought those films out as a filmmaker,” he says, because “as a moviegoer I wanted to see more African American subject matter. But I couldn’t get anything off the ground.”

“Beloved” is a ghost story. It is a family drama. It’s a romance. But it also at times is an excruciatingly visceral depiction of the lives of black folk in the years during and after slavery. The film is inspiring in that it shows the triumph of the human spirit, but it also can be painful to watch. By necessity, it depicts the degradations that its characters had to face, and it shows the tragic, unthinkable lengths to which a woman who “loves too much” might go to shield her young.

To prepare audiences, Touchstone Pictures, the film’s distributor, last week unveiled stage two of its advertising campaign. Without discontinuing earlier television ads and trailers that emphasized the inspiring side of the film, new trailers were put in play that suggest the challenging and deeply disturbing nature of the subject matter.

Reviewers praised “Philadelphia,” Demme’s film about AIDS, as daring when it was released in 1993. It was daring in subject matter. But in truth, everything else about that movie--from the decision to show just a tad of gay affection to the casting of all-American Tom Hanks to the inclusion of a comically bigoted character who could become enlightened by movie’s end--was designed to make a difficult subject palatable to mainstream viewers. “Beloved” makes few such concessions.

With the earlier movie, “as we worked on the screenplay and started thinking it through, trying to characterize that struggle, we gradually came to realize that homophobia was our biggest hurdle,” Demme says. “We wanted to make a movie that was as friendly as possible to the group we were trying to reach, hoping to move.”

But with “Beloved” the filmmakers took chances. “We felt that to back off in any manner from what the book was trying to achieve thematically and narratively would blow it. We felt that the book, being the exquisitely made piece of literature that it is, we really had to honor it.”

In adapting the book, Richard LaGravenese, one of three credited screenwriters, said he threw out the rule book. He did not try to force the material into standard three-act structure. “The thing with ‘Beloved’ was that I found it very musical,” he says. It felt to him that the book was written in movements, like a symphonic piece, and that is how he tried to write it.

He turned in a script that was much less linear than the finished film; it contained more flashbacks to the main characters’ lives on the Sweet Home plantation.

“If the film works, it’s because of Jonathan knowing what to cut away,” he says. “Jonathan’s a great filmmaker and he knows much more than I about what you can condense and still have an audience be able to follow the story.”

After LaGravenese left the movie to work on “Living Out Loud,” his own first film as director, Demme brought in Adam Brooks to polish the script. Akosua Busia had written an earlier version of the screenplay.

“The challenge to the adapter is figuring out what story are you going to tell--there’re at least three fantastic motion pictures that could be made from this book,” Demme says.

The movie easily could have focused on life at Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe was a slave along with Paul D, an old friend who eventually would become her lover. The slaves enjoyed many freedoms under the benevolent hand of Mr. Garner. But when he died, the cruel man known as Schoolteacher took over, and life became a living hell. This hypothetical movie could have shown the pregnant Sethe’s escape and the birth of her youngest daughter along the banks of the Ohio River with the help of a wandering white girl. This is included in the finished film, but Demme says this could easily have worked as a climax, with the film ending with Sethe crossing the river to reunite with what’s left of her family. “Wow, what a movie!” he enthuses. “God!”

A second movie lay in the hardships Paul D faced during his 18-year sojourn as he crossed several states trying to locate Sethe. The unsettled years after the end of slavery form a period that has been ignored not only by filmmakers but also by society at large, says Demme, who has continued to study the era. One powerful and unexpected element of the book, hinted at in the film, is the way people wandered the land trying to reunite with family members, looking for a place to call home.

The filmmakers eliminated most of this, however, as they chose to focus on what seemed to them to be the heart of the story: what happens in the house at 124 Bluestone Road after first Paul D and then Beloved arrives, and everyone’s lives start to change.

“Richard had wanted to try to fuse all three of these movies,” Demme says. In paring it down, the director eliminated all flashbacks to Sethe’s and Paul D’s previous life except those that seemed absolutely necessary. When he did this, he found embedded in the story a multilayered domestic drama that he says could’ve been written by Ibsen, Chekhov or O’Neill, only set in a haunted house.

Even with all the paring away, “Beloved” still does not resemble a typical Hollywood movie. In a film that takes numerous chances--in its subject matter, its ambiguity and its searing images--Demme made two daring and unorthodox choices in the way the narrative is put together that he realizes could do even more to put off viewers.

Winfrey and Danny Glover drop almost completely out of the last third of the movie. The story is turned over to Kimberly Elise, who plays Denver, Sethe’s youngest daughter, as she grows into her own, breaking away from the house and the past.

“On paper it breaks rules to lose touch with your main character for so long,” Demme acknowledges, but he said he had “tremendous faith” in the power of Denver’s story. “For me this is what brings the element of triumphant hope and uplift to the story.

“The other thing that breaks the rules is the eight-minute-long mini-movie in the middle of the film in which Denver tells Beloved the story of her birth.” The flashback comes at a point of tension in the main story. “The scary part was when we return to the present how difficult would it be to pick up the pieces of the characters,” he says.

“The book could just take off into another direction whenever it damn well pleases,” he says.