Word: savannah
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nearly three hours, Eastwood's ponderous adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil creeps along like a slug under the hot Georgia sun. Drag is indeed the most striking feature of this unwieldy film, and I'm not talking about Lady Chablis, the preeminent transvestite of Savannah...
...Williams is only one of many, many characters Berendt has on file. There's also Luther Driggers, an eccentric chemist who carries on his person a vial of poison powerful enough to kill every man, woman and child in Savannah; Joe Odom, a ne'er-do-well lawyer who lives in other people's houses and steals electricity from next door when the power company cuts him off; and, of course, the irrepressible Lady Chablis...
...results are disastrous. Midnight is one of those rare films that cries out for a voice-over, but Eastwood and his writers seem to have consciously avoided that course of action. Instead, they give us John Kelso (Cusack), an idealistic young writer from New York who comes to Savannah to write an essay on a Christmas party and ends up getting involved in Williams' murder trial. By embroiling Kelso in the plot, the refreshing detachment of Berendt's narrative is lost. The story shifts from the town and people of Savannah to the fictional Kelso--his life, his ideals...
...credit, there is no old-fashioned, romantic heterosexual love in the original Midnight. Its most interesting and lovable characters are con men, hustlers, drag queens and witches. Berendt's narrator revels unrepentantly in Savannah's decadence and its culture of closeted scandal. He falls in love with the city's roguishness, its peculiar brand of dark but endearing degeneracy cloaked in gentility. In short, he is nothing like Cusack's dippy, sententious young idealist. The closest he comes to romance is a date with a drag queen. And he certainly bears no resemblance to the late Elvis Presley, whom Cusack...
...this Midnight is worth seeing for fabulous performances like these, not to mention the beautiful footage of Savannah, the uncredited star of the show. Best to sit back and soak up the Southern sun (which Eastwood manages to capture quite beautifully), then steadily tune out everything Cusack says and does. What will emerge is the real spirit of Berendt's Savannah, simultaneously anarchic and genteel--a cocktail potent enough to survive even the worst ravages of Hollywood hackery...