From The Savannah Morning News:
The first review is in:
By Gene Downs
Savannah Morning News
At last we come to the big question: how good is Clint Eastwood's film adaptation of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"?
Is it a worthy successor to superior Savannah-made films such as "Glory" and "Forrest Gump"? Or is it in a league with unfortunates "Now and Then" and "Wild America"?
Critical opinion will have little effect on attendance here. This is a must-see for locals. Avoid it and there will be no keeping up with social chitchat for many months.
So it's required viewing even if you already know that it's about New York writer John Kelso (portrayed by John Cusack) who becomes embroiled in the case of Savannah antiques dealer Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey) charged with murdering a bad-boy hustler named Billy (Jude Law).
And it's required viewing even if you're sick of reading about the characters who populate the sidelines, from drag diva The Lady Chablis (played by none other than The Lady Chablis) to unflappable playboy Joe Odom (Paul Hipp) to blonde sexpot Mandy (Alison Eastwood, the directorÕs daughter) to voodoo priestess Minerva (Irma P. Hall).
What you get for the price of a ticket is sumptuous scenery, some good performances and a plot trying to cover so much territory that it forgets where it's going and where it has been.
Odom, whom Hipp portrays with appropriate flash and flair, disappears halfway through the film—done away with so his fiancee Mandy will be available as a love interest for Kelso. The result is that Hipp brings color to the early proceedings but provides little dramatic substance.
That is where the movie clearly falters: too many characters try to supply too much color while doing too little to advance the story.
Clearly, screenwriter John Lee Hancock waged a virtually unwinnable war in adapting John Berendt's best-seller—a job Berendt himself emphatically declined and Hancock initially turned down. The book is episodic, a series of tales interwoven yet unrelated, with Savannah itself a leading character. The unorthodox approach works beautifully in print but lunges rather awkwardly to the screen.
It's impossible to tell who—Hancock or editor Joel Cox—is responsible for taking us on rambles into places that should have been left unexplored. One wonders if the narrative flow was better served in Clint Eastwood's four-hour rough cut Maybe the longer version defined OdomÕs place in the plot, gave resolution to the Mandy/Kelso romance, built tension and made sense. Maybe not.
Story-wise, the film will be most easily followed by the book's fans.
Who, after all, is the sour-faced woman shown several times during Williams' trial? If you've read the book, you can figure out that she's Billy's mother. Otherwise, you might just as easily conclude that she's a disgruntled court stenographer.
The performances are of scatter-shot quality. As Williams'' attorney Sonny Seiler, Australian actor Jack Thompson walks away with the acting honors. If there's an Oscar nomination to be had among the players, Thompson win get it.
Spacey looks eerily like the real-life Jim Williams. Tackling a blandly drawn character, the actor is uniformly suave, cool and collected.
As Kelso, Cusack is Cusack. He has perfected the open-mouthed look of shock, which is all the role requires of him. In a debut performance that was reportedly mostly ad libbed, The Lady Chablis gives us most of the film's good laughs. If not the greatest actor in the world, Chablis is without question the greatest Chablis in the world.
As Billy, Law isn't particularly menacing or sexy, a point sure to be contested by the actor's legions of young female fans. Alison Eastwood however, is terrific. Her Southern accent sometimes strays out of bounds, as when Mandy asks Kelso "Y'all got any ahs (ice)?" But overall the female Eastwood is perfectly charming and very natural.
Locals will have fun spotting downtown landmarks and snickering at geographic liberties taken by the filmmakers. For instance, Kelso asks a bus driver to take him to Jones Street but is delivered to a house on Taylor, and Chippewa Square is identified as Forsyth Park.
Whether the critics or word-of-mouth says the movie is good, bad, or merely so-so, Savannah will turn out to see it.
The next big question is, will anyone else?
Re-printed with permission of the author, Gene Downs/The Savannah Morning News.
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