I have often said that it it important to separate the art from the artist, and while there are some artists I can’t quite do that for, I for the most part can for Kevin Spacey. Yes, I have no plans to watch any new work he produces, but older movies and such are, as far as I am concerned, fair game. That leads me to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and even if I do have issues with Spacey, Clint Eastwood is still one of my favorite living directors. True, much of Eastwood’s most recent work seems to be biopics of heroic Americans, but he has made some of my favorite movies, and even if his most recent stuff hasn’t been as good as works like Unforgivien or American Sniper, at the least he can deliver something solid with the right actors in place.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is actually based on a nonfiction novel, so I suppose it could count as one of Eastwood’s based-on-a-true-story movies even if it came out long before he started making a lot of those.
Writer John Kelso (John Cusack) is in Savannah, Georgia to write about one of the famed Christmas parties held by the wealthy antiques dealer and art collector Jim Williams (Spacey). Williams is a suspected closet case, and sometime after the party, Williams has shot and killed local redneck-looking fellow Billy Hanson (Jude Law).
OK, considering that Spacey outed himself as an attempt to justify his cruddy behavior to various younger men over the years and Law looking almost unrecognizable with a full head of hair and a Confederate flag tattoo on his arm…yeah, there was some stuff here that didn’t age as well as it probably was supposed to.
Regardless, Jim and his lawyer Sonny (Jack Thompson) opt to more or less hire Kelso to look into the murder. Jim is very upfront that he did in fact pull the trigger. The only real question, one that must be proved in court, was whether or not Jim shot Billy in self-defense or not. Much of the rest of the movie shows Kelso dealing with the various eccentrics such as men walking nonexistent dogs, horsefly covered men threatening the water supply with what may be a jar of poison, and celebrity bulldogs. Voodoo priestess Minerva (Irma P. Hall) claims to be able to talk to the dead man’s ghost, something Jim may or may not believe in, and Kelso finds himself romancing a local torch singer played by the director’s daughter.
Most interesting given the time period, but a lot less unique now, is the presence of a trans woman drag performer, the Lady Chablis more or less playing herself. Eastwood apparently let her ad-lib most of her lines. Given all the eccentrics, the presence of an African American trans woman may have looked fairly special and unique in 1997, but this is 2021, and RuPaul’s Drag Race is a popular reality show.
The movie ultimately offers no solution or answer to what really happened between Jim and Billy. The shooting takes place off-screen, and Jim tells different stories at different points in the narrative while he isn’t selling antiques over the phone without telling the potential buyer Jim is making the sale over a prison phone. Eastwood’s best work always tells stories slowly and with a bit of grace, trusting his actors to make the most of their screen time, and Spacey, for all his disgrace today, does have a lot of screen charisma, here trotting out what may be a prototype for his Frank Underwood character. That said, the movie does have a very by-the-numbers feel to it despite the eccentric weirdos. Spacey’s Jim Williams spends long periods of time off-screen somewhere, with Cusack’s Kelso being the main character, and there’s little to the man to set him apart from the others as protagonists go. Anyone hoping for a tense potboiler will be disappointed, but if you’d rather a more leisurely tale of Southern oddballs in the city of Savannah dealing with a murder trial, well, then this one might be OK.
Grade: B-
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