Director Clint Eastwood (not actor, too, this time) takes on John Berendt's "nonfiction novel" about a sensational homicide in Savannah, Ga., about the people of Savannah, about the history and the culture of Savannah, about Savannah in general. The early evidence of its reshaping for the screen is very encouraging: we now have what the book did not have, a central character and a natural point of connection; we have logic and coherence; we have a narrative. And this narrative is spun out in the distinctive Eastwood style, at the distinctive Eastwood pace and distinctive Eastwood duration: well over two hours. It moves forward as a gently flowing river, with no precipitous man-made falls, no churned-up rapids, no hazardous hairpins. Unfortunately, the gently flowing river ultimately debouches into a stagnant pool: many a fluent filmmaker has found himself similarly stalled in a courtroom. And compressing three -- or was it four? -- separate trials into a single trial has tended to thicken things rather than tighten them. And the case itself -- was the suave nouveau riche antiques dealer and closet homosexual justified in shooting his volatile low-class lover? -- is not automatically fascinating simply because it's factual or because we can't know the full truth of it. Maybe Eastwood imagined that his alienness to homosexual terrain (to say nothing of voodoo terrain) could not help but spark some added fascination. It would almost certainly have sparked more of it if, as once proposed, he had played the antiques dealer himself: played against his image, in other words, in an even more radical way than in Honkytonk Man or White Hunter, Black Heart. (Clearly he is much too old to have played the outside observer, who is his obvious surrogate.) In any event, it's fair to speculate that his alienness to the terrain has led him to overestimate the fascination of it. With John Cusack, Kevin Spacey, Jack Thompson, Alison Eastwood, Irma P. Hall, and the (real) Lady Chablis. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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