Review of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) by Devon B — 27 Feb 2009

John Kelso (John Cusack) comes from New York to write an article on the party for Town and Country magazine, but gets sucked into hanging around when Jim is put on trial for murder. Everythings odd and everyone's eccentric in Savannah: a man walks an invisible dog, an old voodoo woman skulks around, talking to squirrels, and then there's the drag queen.

One night, John is awakened by a beautiful blonde woman who drags him off to an eccentric party. The next night he attends Jim's party and there's more eccentrics, including Jim's handyman (Jude Law) whom Jim winds up killing later in the evening, in what appears to be self-defense.

John calls his publicist, telling him "this place is like 'Gone With The Wind' on mescaline" and "New York is boring!". Which brings us to Lady Chablis, a real life transvestite performer cast in this movie to play a transvestite performer.

Of course she's great and dominates the film when she's onscreen, but in a movie that's nearly 3 hours, her scenes feel absolutely unnecessary and contribute nothing other than a plot contrivance later in the film.

Likewise the blonde and her moustached companion. I kept expecting there to be some twist where it was revealed they were the actual murderers or conspirators, but it seems their appearance in this film was equally pointless.

By the end of the movie, the trial starts to get just plain silly, and the voodoo ending came off like an old episode of "tales from the crypt". And Jude Law fails to pull off a convincing southern accent, just so you know.

Overall, a sloppy movie that ends up kind of nonsensical.