A pet project of star and co-producer (and otherwise TV talk-show queen) Oprah Winfrey, an adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel concerning a tangibly "haunted" black family in postbellum Ohio. The adjustment of former slaves to an unaccustomed state of freedom is untrampled territory in movies, and this one opens a path to boundless possibilities. (It does not come close to settling the territory.) The actual moment of achieved freedom, the perilous flight to freedom, and the preceding oppression on the plantation have been covered extensively, and are covered here again, with abundant and piled-on brutality, in flashback. Most of the weightiest portions of the narrative occur in the flashbacks, and the greater objection to these is not the brutality, much less the familiarity, of it all, but instead the disorderly, arbitrary, bit-by-bit way in which the information is gotten across to us. There appears to be no particular plan as to what exactly we find out, when we find it out, how much of it we will be allowed to find out at any one time. We can develop little confidence in the rambling and rickety structure of the piece. Clearly the movie means a great deal to its makers, not just to Winfrey, but also to director Jonathan Demme -- once a culty filmmaker, now a model of mainstream respectability -- in his first outing since Philadelphia five years past. One literal measure of how much it means to them is the precise length of the thing, a few minutes shy of three hours. But these are three hours of paceless start and stop, of backtrack and fill-in and now-where-were-we. Three discursive and turgid and turbid hours. With Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, and Lisa Gay Hamilton. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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