Word: eastwoods
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Drag is the hallmark of this unwieldy film, and we're not talking about Lady Chablis. Clint Eastwood's lumbering adaptation of John Berendt's bestseller falls short of expectations, rendering the unique pantheon of Savannah personalities as mere cartoons and focusing too much on a long, drawn-out murder trial. John Cusack fumbles through the role of the script's too-young, too-straight stand-in for Berendt's narrator. But despite these flaws, Kevin Spacey shines as Jim Williams, the enigmatic gay antiques dealer who kills his lover in what may or may not have been self-defense...
Drag is the hallmark of this unwieldy film, and we're not talking about Lady Chablis. Clint Eastwood's lumbering adaptation of John Berendt's bestseller falls short of expectations, rendering the unique pantheon of Savannah personalities as mere cartoons and focusing too much on a long, drawn-out murder trial. John Cusack fumbles through the role of the script's too-young, too-straight stand-in for Berendt's narrator. But despite these flaws, Kevin Spacey shines as Jim Williams, the enigmatic gay antiques dealer who kills his lover in what may or may not have been selfdefense...
John Berendt's nonfiction best seller has yet to appear between soft covers. So the film, directed by Clint Eastwood, serves as the audiovisual paperback version. It is likely to disappoint the book's acolytes and tax the patience of newcomers...
Screenwriter John Lee Hancock fuses Williams' four murder trials into one but is faithful to the local fauna: the gun-waving doyen, the man who walks an invisible dog, the voodoo priestess, the man haloed by horseflies. Eastwood has cast Williams' attorney as the trial judge and, as him(her)self, the Lady Chablis, a drag queen of note--one note--in a turn that will make no one forget Jaye Davidson...
Like the way-too-wide-eyed Cusack, Eastwood lingers over these mild deviates from the norm as if they were the critter in Alien Autopsy. This film might have trusted more in Spacey's sly glamour, and in Williams as a wily game player to the death. Possibly...