Alan Parker's fictionalization of an FBI probe into the murders of three Civil Rights activists, ca. 1964, has come under fire for, among other things, ignoring the black involvement in "the movement." That notwithstanding, the real trouble with the movie, so far from it not doing enough with the subject, is that it tries to do too much. The trouble, more exactly, is not that it's just a detective movie, but that it isn't just a detective movie. Such a movie, in the normal course of the investigation, would have ample opportunity to talk of the racial bias within the Bureau itself; of the probability that the case would not have been pursued at all had two of the murder victims not been white and Northern; of the Southern resentment of outsiders; and of the presence of these outsiders as stimulus to increased violence against blacks. All of this is touched upon, or distantly hailed at, or in the case of the violence against blacks mercilessly hammered away at -- but it is never firmly gripped. That's because Parker does not believe it's enough. He is wrong. It's plenty. (Or rather could have been plenty.) Even the too-sharp, too-schematic contrast between the original partners on the case -- a pragmatic former Mississippi sheriff and an idealistic Harvard-educated New Frontiersman -- might still have been within the realm of Enough: it makes sense that their superiors could have deemed these two to have special, complementary talents for the job. What pushes it decisively over the border and into the land of Too Much is their mode of addressing each other in overheated Socratic dialogue, with the Mississippi man inclined toward homespun wit and the Harvard man given to philosophical posers like "What's wrong with these people?" and "Where does it come from, all this hatred?" Not just between these two, but all around them, there are entirely too many pithy position statements passed off as natural dialogue. And entirely too many passed off as artificial monologue, too: direct address to TV interviewers has become the scriptwriter's greatest labor-saving device since the invention of voice-over narration. Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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