Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil

Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast:
John Cusack
Jude Law
Kevin Spacey
Irma P. Hall

I'll cut to the chase on this one, because quite frankly, I'm stunned. "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is an absolute train wreck of a movie, so indecipherably bad that reviewing it is a quick lesson in the Art of Where to Start? John Berendt's book was so lyrical, so meanderingly gorgeous that it seemed a film version would be a hard task. But did it have to turn out like this? John Cusack plays John Kelso, the writer from "Town and Country" magazine, sent to Savannah to cover the Christmas party of Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey), the man about town who ends up killing his sometime-lover (Jude Law) in a late-night drunken scuffle. Claiming self-defense, the movie changes focus to the trial, where a couple of trivialities serve to help get Williams off the hook. Dotting the cityscape are a bunch of "personalities" who serve to make the South that much more wacky—a man who walks a dog that doesn't exist, a guy who ties horseflies to his shirt, a piano player who steals electricity from other people's homes—you get the picture.

Anyone who has read the book will be horrified by Clint Eastwood's directorial incompetence: you'll want to see the stories of your favorite characters, but what you get is a five-second, dime store version of them that leaves you feeling violated. And if you haven't read the book, all of the Southern-fried touches of Savannah society come off as patronizing and mean-spirited, our everyman Cusack rolling his eyes at this place full of wackos.

Motionless and adrift in bad ideas, "Midnight in the Garden" has no thematic center, leaving the audience in a moral swampland for the better part of two hours. Possible themes rear their heads like marsh creatures from the Sea Islands... Is it that all men have secrets? That there is no such thing as the truth? That if you don't commune with the dead, they will come back and give you congestive heart failure? Full of red herrings that stink up the place like the back end of a Georgian wharf (I mean, what the hell was with all the voodoo crap?), the movie's biggest, most unforgivable flaw is its inherent misunderstanding of Berendt's love for Savannah.

Passionless, dry and held together with packing tape, Eastwood's vision of the story is so confusingly awful that it will leave even the purists gasping for meaning. When we left the theater, I couldn't get my mom's words out of my head: "Some books can never be movies." Maybe so, I asked, but again, "did it have to be like this?

—Ian Williams

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