Review of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) by Edith N — 25 May 2010

Communing With the Dead.

This is a story filtered through several layers. You can, if you so choose, go looking for trial records of James Arthur Williams in the shooting death of Danny Lewis Hansford. You can still go to Savannah and see Mercer House standing on Monterey Square, where it was built for a man who never lived in it but whose name it bears nonetheless. Dorothy Kingery, Jim's sister, owns it now and has opened it for tours. But beyond that, you may read what John Berendt wrote about it in his book, which is an excellent example of the creative nonfiction genre. His telling of the story winds in the lives of various of the other colourful residents of Savannah in the 1980s. His own perceptions of Williams and the others naturally alter behaviour and dialogue. And then John Lee Hancock wrote a screenplay, trimming and altering still further as he went, which Clint Eastwood directed. And of course, in the end, no one living knows what happened that night anyway.

"John Kelso" (John Cusack) is not at all Berendt. He has been sent to cover the annual Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey) Christmas party, the high point of Savannah society, or anyway one of them. Williams only permitted magazine coverage so he could meet Kelso, whose book Jim seems to be the only person to have read. He and Kelso hit it off quite well. A little less pleasant is "Billy Hanson" (Jude Law), whose name is presumably changed so his family won't sue. It is undisputed that there was a fight. It is undisputed that Jim shot Billy. The question is whether Jim murdered the boy or killed him in self-defense. Kelso ends up as part of the Williams legal team alonside his attorney, Sonny Seiler (Jack Thompson; the real Seiler plays Judge Judge White). He has promised to share any information he finds with the defense in exchange to having first dibs on any information which will make his book more interesting.

If Savannah is half so interesting as book and movie make it appear, Kelso's comment about how it's like [i]Gone With the Wind[/i] on mescaline is not inaccurate. The story involves voodoo and drag, guns and debutante balls. There is Luther Driggers (Geoffrey Lewis), who glues leashes onto flies and carries a vial said to be enough poison to kill every man, woman, and child if he puts it into the water supply. There is, of course, the delightful Lady Chablis, playing herself, as the ultimate sassy black drag queen. (Who looks just fabulous!) There is professional squatter Joe Odom (Paul Hipp) and his girlfriend, Mandy (the lovely Alison Eastwood), whose relationship becomes less and less defined as she gets involved with Kelso. Sonny goes running off to a football game the weekend before the trial starts; he is the owner, or perhaps just keeper, of Uga, the mascot of the University of Georgia. And, of course, there is Minerva (Irma P. Hall), the voodoo queen of Savannah, a valued member of Jim's defense team.

Unfortunately, the story loses ground by being trimmed from the book. The book has room to meander around Savannah, including the odder quirks of the city's history. There's no place in the movie for the debutante ball, really; it serves to give the Lady Chablis motivation for helping the defence, but it still slows down the action and seems to be there because of the implications if it's trimmed. Emma Kelly gets a brief cameo at the party, which is great, and Minerva is necessary to both the story as a whole and our understanding of Kelso in particular. (Also, without her, we don't have a title.) The romance between Kelso and Mandy kind of struggles to fit, and it isn't even in the book in the first place. (We do also get a very quick cameo from Jerry Spence as himself, quick enough so that it slows nothing down.) Joe Odom is, with the Lady Chablis, Kelso's guide to the twists and turns of Savannah--in the book, Joe expresses a wish to play himself in the movie, but he died before even the book came out. It just feels, at times, as though they couldn't bear to trim anyone interesting, and they're all interesting.

What sells the movie, however, is Kevin Spacey. He is generally, at least to me, associated with playing the resigned everyman. Jim Williams was assuredly neither. However, Spacey doesn't play him as one. In this movie, Jim is suave and debonair--and completely unprepared for the Real World. This despite the fact that he freely admits to having grown up poor. It is possible to imagine him as killing in self defense or in cold blood, which is important. He moves in Savannah society smoothly and gracefully. In fact, most of the extras in the party scene are actual former guests of the Williams Christmas party, and they agree that Spacey reminded them very much of Jim. He was a man of rich tastes, except when it came to rough trade. As played by Kevin Spacey, none of what happens to him over the course of the movie feels out of place for the character. Not even the voodoo.