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Review: Midnight lasts forever in 'Garden of Good and Evil'
Movie drags on even longer than its title
From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- First a little quiz. What's the only thing slower than a movie directed by Clint Eastwood? That's easy -- a movie directed by Clint Eastwood that's based on a wildly popular novel full of "quirky" characters, every one of whom has to be quirky over and over again so that fans of the book will feel they've seen a full rendering of what packed them into the theater in the first place.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
I've never read "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" (I hear from several people I trust that it's first-rate), but after sitting through Eastwood's endless film version of the story, I'd be willing to bet that I'm now familiar with every square inch of it, excluding the font and binding technique. But that's OK. There's more than enough binding technique in Eastwood's handling of the material to make up for it.
Partial trailer 842K/23 sec./160x120
QuickTime movieAll right, it runs 135 minutes, which is lengthy enough, but for all the supposedly goofy nothing that fills up the screen, 30 minutes could have easily been chopped out and not a thing would have been lost. Plus, there's the film's tiresome insistence on portraying Southerners (in this case, the inhabitants of Savannah, Jaw-Jaw) as a bunch of bourbon-swilling crackpots, smoking Tiparillos and immediately volunteering the eccentric life history of every person who waltzes through the door. It may work on the printed page, but the repetitious onscreen presentation of this sort of stuff is enough to make Flannery O'Connor queasy.
John Cusack stars as John Kelso, a freelance writer who's been sent to Savannah by Town and Country magazine to cover an elegant Christmas party that's being thrown by a local bigwig named Jim Williams. Williams is a closeted gay antiques dealer who shakes, or kisses, the hand of each and every person who attends his bashes. I know this for a fact because Eastwood spends about five minutes showing him do just that. Kevin Spacey is perfectly cast as Williams, and, oddly, this may actually work against him.
Spacey's well-tooled charm and slightly distanced irony is always fun to watch (and positively seductive in "L.A. Confidential"), but we've seen it so many times before it's hard to sense any mystery in Williams, even after the movie turns into a courtroom drama when he shoots and kills a local redneck who was probably his lover. Spacey is so comfortable in Williams' skin, you never sense that the guy's in the least bit of danger, even when he's being demeaned by snarling cons while locked up in the pokey. This refined detachment was probably Spacey's intention, and it may play well at a cocktail party, but it does nothing to establish any dramatic pull to the story.
That's not such a big deal, though, because Eastwood evidently had no intention of establishing a dramatic pull. When I say that his directing technique is slow going, I'm not automatically saying that he's a poor director. Quite the contrary. Both "Unforgiven" and "The Bridges of Madison County" crawl along like a wounded Confederate soldier, but they work for just that reason. There's an existential weight (if I can get that fancy) to what's happening to the main characters in those movies. It makes sense that things don't zip along. You would imagine that Jim Williams, locked up in a holding cell when he's used to living a life of opulence, would be sweating it a little, but Spacey (as I've already implied) doesn't sweat, and Eastwood isn't all that interested in Jim Williams anyway.
He is, however, very interested in the voodoo priestess and the drag queen, for reasons that are not altogether clear while considering the material. Cusack's character, who actually does little more than repeatedly gape at "weird" people around Savannah, spends a great deal of time in the company of a local transvestite named Lady Chablis, who, in a cosmic coincidence, is played by a transvestite named Lady Chablis. Go figure.
The Lady is sometimes quite hilarious, reveling in her ability to disrupt any social gathering that the city has to offer, but her connection to Jim Williams' troubles is thin at best, and, in some scenes, near non-existent. Why, in the middle of a murder trial, Eastwood decides to spend an eternity showing Chablis dance a rumba at an all-black cotillion is beyond me. It's like having a menacing attack dog move in on an unsuspecting bystander, then panning over to watch a poodle get groomed and powdered. Once again, go figure.
The voodoo priestess, played by Irma P. Hall, may or may not have an effect on the outcome of the story by casting some spells in a graveyard one night, but it isn't remotely frightening. Eastwood's visual style here is pretty darn dull. All the shots are square little things containing nothing approaching an imaginative flourish. In my book, voodoo incantations are not doing their job if I don't feel the least tinge of uneasiness. Hall, with her lazy Southern syntax and ever-present Ray-bans, comes off more like Lightnin' Hopkins in drag. I was afraid Lady Chablis would get wind that someone was working her side of the street and beat her to death with her purse. That would've been too much action, though.
What it all boils down to is "quirkiness" is not something that can be grafted onto a director's sensibility. Eastwood has often been involved in projects that come somewhat out of left field (check out a piece of Southern gothic called "The Beguiled" for what I consider to be his best performance, and the best film he's appeared in), but the man is a rock of granite. He can tie living bugs onto his shirt with pieces of thread (as one of the nut-cases in "Midnight" does) all he wants, but the result is still going be Mount Rushmore and a couple of bugs. Which one do you think is going to win the battle for your attention?
"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" includes one shooting, a little profanity, and sexual discussion. Lady Chablis may ruffle some feathers if you believe exclusively in your own limited sense of identity. Rated R. 135 minutes.
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