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Clint Eastwood's horrid adaptation of John Berendt's best-selling novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is nothing but Matlock with a drawl.
BY KIM MORGAN, 243-2122 EXT. 342
When John C. Calhoun wailed from his deathbed "The South! The South! What will become of her?!" he had no idea how prophetic his question was. Particularly when answered by writer John Berendt, who single-handedly has made the South--specifically Savannah, Ga.--a veritable tourist hell, a place where sojourners go to catch some of the wicked Georgian spirit so thickly applied in Berendt's best-seller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. With an intriguing murder case, Southern voodoo and an assortment of humorous characters straight out of Tallulah Bankheadville, New York writer Berendt fashioned a story out of his love affair with Savannah, the place Henry Miller called "a living tomb about which there still clings a sensuous aura as in old Corinth." Critically lauded and voraciously read by the public, the book has not only hung onto the bestseller list since 1994 (a paperback edition is yet to be produced), but has been rather hysterically received as even better than Capote's In Cold Blood, which it is most certainly not. Entertaining, but often wearisome, Berendt's book is a puffy page turner--tailor-made for a long, boring flight or a bedridden bout with bronchitis. In short, it's an overrated yet fun book filled with screen potential. Berendt's true fiction captures enough points of American interest--homosexuality, murder, drag queens and particularly the good ol' non-PC ways of Southern folk--that it was practically clawing its way to celluloid. And who better, then, to adapt this disjointed confection than the man who made The Bridges of Madison County bearable: Clint Eastwood. Given his distinguished pedigree (Unforgiven, High Plains Drifter, Bird), he would seem able to tackle the job. But this is not the case. A messy, contrived work of amateurish quality, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is simply one of the worst films of the year. John Cusack is writer John Kelso (Berendt), a man who settles in Savannah after becoming mesmerized by its local color. When the local young stud, Billy Hanson (Jude Law), is shot and killed by his lover and prominent citizen Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey), Kelso stumbles into a juicy pot-boiler murder-mystery that, when published, proves the saying "death sells." This murder is particularly intriguing because of Williams, an antique dealer and restoration specialist who lives in a prominent mansion called Mercer House--built in 1860 by Gen. Hugh Mercer, the great-grandfather of songwriter Johnny Mercer. A fascinating character of both steely indifference and Southern charm (and the most intriguing character in Berendt's book), Williams shows little remorse in his dapper, arrogant manner. Kelso befriends Williams, interviews him in jail, and follows his case closely, yet is puzzled by the man and never convinced of either his innocence or his guilt. Kelso also gets to know an assortment of other characters who are self-consciously wacky and sickeningly Southern. There is a drag queen called the Lady Chablis (played by the Lady herself), a kooky old dame who flounces around in feathers, a crooked neighbor who parties until the wee hours, and Mandy Nichols (Alison Eastwood). So entranced by these characters' unconventional behavior, Kelso's study of the murder case becomes less of the story's focus and more of a punctuation mark to his slack-jawed awe. It's as if he is continually thinking: "This place sure is weird, and don't we all want to know about it!" But after five minutes of the film, we don't want to know about it. We don't even want to read the book--we cannot stand these people. Screenwriter John Lee Hancock, who penned Eastwood's A Perfect World, spreads the characters bone-thin and makes them one-dimensionally annoying. The book's Southern Gothic charm--already sophomoric compared with the likes of Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams and even Margaret Mitchell--is so contrived and clumsy on screen that the actors are reduced to embarrassing clichés, and even the best of them sink. Even worse is the film's use of real-life Savannah residents in minor roles. Eastwood wanted authenticity, but how could he get it when the city has already become Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil crazy? Eastwood also insisted on shooting inside actual Savannah landmarks, and it seems he used open mikes; the sound quality is awful. The echoing dialogue bounces off the walls and sometimes even warps into indistinguishable noise--something like Orson Welles' slurred performance in The Long Hot Summer, but not nearly as amusing. Perhaps worse is what could have been the film's saving grace: the cinematography. Rather than a sultry portrait of succulence where you can almost smell the flowers and sweat in the air, Midnight is a cold piece of ugly harshness. Was Eastwood trying to do cinéma vérité? If so, his experimentation looks like a cheap TV drama from the '80s. This is gorgeous Savannah, not Matlock. So what the hell happened? Why did these people make such a mess of things? Too many mint juleps? Drunkenness could account for the film's sloppy sentimentality. True to the book (and even more so), the characters are just too aware of how "Southern" they are. The eccentric topics of a "ratha disturbin' nate-chur" are so tired that it's impossible to keep the eyes from rolling to the ceiling. In good Southern fiction, people don't act so Designing Women. Berendt and Eastwood (though obviously embraced by the community) are impressionable outsiders. They make the city cute, eccentric and unenigmatic. In the words of Flannery O'Connor: "I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why." Berendt and Eastwood have no idea. |
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