Review of Mississippi Burning (1988) by Edith N — 19 Dec 2007

There are quite a lot of differences between this and the story upon which it is loosely based. For one, its protagonists--and boy, has it taken a lot of heat for having a pair of white protagonists in a movie about the civil rights movement--are completely fictional. The conflict between the Good Ol' Boy and the Kennedy Liberal is great cinema, but it's lousy history. Most of the details about [i]how[/i] the case was resolved are bogus; I feel certain, for example, that any competent attorney could have gotten the deputy's case thrown out of court on an issue of police brutality. It is, however, true that, to this day, only one of the conspirators of the real crime has actually been charged with murder; everyone else who was charged at all was charged with violating the men's civil rights.

Now, mind you, I saw this movie for the first time in my college class about the South; we saw it as much as a work of history as a work of literature. The people may not have been particularly real, but certainly the attitudes were. In that same class, I watched [i]Eyes on the Prize[/i], and there were film clips in it wherein people said almost word-for-word what some people in [i]Mississippi Burning[/i] say. There were, indeed, people who thought the disappearances were a hoax. There were people who thought the whole thing was staged by Martin Luther King, who was [i]obviously[/i] a Communist, because J. Edgar Hoover said so. There were people who thought Southern blacks had received pretty fair treatment.

For those who don't know, this film is loosely based on the real search for the killers of J. E. Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, three civil rights workers who had been part of a voters' registration drive. They were pulled over and murdered; a massive FBI investigation was sparked, eventually finding the car in a swamp and the bodies in an earthen dike. After much work and much resentment, half a dozen or so local men were eventually imprisoned for violating the men's civil rights, which of course involve the right to not get shot and left in an earthen dike.

There's an interesting cast, here. Our Heroes are played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, who was only 33 at the time. R. Lee Ermey has a rare acting role, as opposed to his usual shouting role. Brad Dourif plays yet another vile, vile man. Frances McDormand plays his wife. Michael Rooker plays another minor but important role. These people play off one another in ways that only a truly superior cast can.

There are more accurate historical movies. I could at some point post a list of them, were I so inclined, though quite a lot of the historical movies we've reviewed here would not make it. But again, while it gets the history wrong, it never fails to get the atmosphere right. That, at least, is worth something.