Clint Eastwood's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is Southern Gothic Done Wrong
CW: Kevin Spacey
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
The flood of ugly revelations brought about by the long-overdue #MeToo movement has posed a lot of provocative, possibly unanswerable questions about how we consume art and entertainment and the difficulty of separating the art from the artist.
Is it amoral to support the movies, books, albums and TV shows of people who have committed unspeakable crimes inextricably connected to their fame, money and power? Can we look at the art of monsters with anything even vaguely approximating objectivity, or will their creations forever tainted by moral and legal crimes?
Are we complicit in the crimes of people like R. Kelly and Bill Cosby because we gave them the money, power and fame to operate beyond the limits of the law? Is it possible to look at the entertainment of the fallen through any prism but their fall?
Since Anthony Rapp went public with accusations that Kevin Spacey drunkenly tried to sexually assault him when he was 14 years old, essentially ending the Spacey’s career, I’ve seen a lot of folks on social media write about how the allegations have ruined Spacey’s movies for them because they’re so distracted by his real-life infamy that it becomes impossible to get lost in the fantasy and fiction of the film and not be continually reminded of the actor’s status as a suspected sex criminal.
The makers of Ridley Scott’s All the Money In the World were so worried that audiences would look at Spacey and be unable to think about anything other than what a disgusting human being he is that they went to the extreme step of replacing him with another actor even though the movie was finished shooting.
It certainly did not bode well for Spacey’s suddenly dead career that replacing him even after a film was essentially finished and ready for distribution turned out to be All the Money in the World’s most successful aspect.
An 88 year old Christopher Plummer became the oldest man to score an Oscar nomination for acting for coming in after the last second to shoot scenes as J. Paul Getty that would very successfully replace the ones Spacey had shot in the role.
Needless to say, that weird Christmas monologue he did in character as his heavy from House of Games that I wrote up for My World of Flops didn’t exactly catapult Spacey back to the top of the A-list either.
I don’t have as much of a problem watching Spacey’s movies now because his appeal as an actor has never been likability or relatability. I don’t look at the characters Spacey plays and think, “I am that guy”, “I like that guy” or “I wanna be that guy.”
Instead, I think Spacey’s characters are creepy because they’re played by a famously creepy guy who specializes in playing villains who are so smart, arrogant and narcissistic that they think they can literally get away with murder because the laws, legal and otherwise, that rule lesser souls don’t apply to Uber-mensches like themselves.
Nobody seemed at all surprised when Kevin Spacey turned out to be the kind of character he played in movie after movie in real life as well, someone who abused his extraordinary power in film, TV and the stage in his pursuit of much younger men and lived a life of secrets and lies. It was almost as if Spacey was confessing through his choice in film roles. In a moment that vibrates with historical irony, one of the many overly dramatic Southern belles of Midnight in the Garden of Garden of Good and Evil quips that Jim Williams, the wealthy antiques dealer Spacey plays, sure “chose a very unseemly way to exit the closet.”
She’s referring to Jim’s homosexuality becoming public knowledge when he’s accused of killing his much younger lover Billy Hanson (Jude Law) but she could just as easily be talking about how Spacey only came out after he’d been accused of trying to have sex with a child, an accusation of sexual misconduct that was followed up by over a dozen more, many related to Spacey’s former position as the artistic director of the Old Vic Theater.
Yes, Kevin Spacey plays a real Kevin Spacey-like creep in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, an adaptation of John Berendt’s runaway best-seller about sinister doings in the Deep South.
In The Rainmaker entry in this column, I talked about the concept of a “Super South” of the public imagination, where everyone has a gumbo-thick accent, has a drink in one hand and a gun in the other and everything is as cartoonishly Southern as possible.
I live in Atlanta but I’ve had the pleasure of visiting various hot spots in the Super South when vacationing with my wife’s family. This includes Savannah, Georgia, the beautiful and very weird hamlet where Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil takes place.
My overall impression of Savannah was that it was very beautiful, very Southern and very haunted. My wife and I went on a ghost tour of the town. We thought it would be fun and kitschy. Instead it was soul-crushingly depressing because many, if not most, of the ghosts involved were slaves who died horrible deaths at the hands of a brutal and amoral system.
Savannah isn’t just the setting of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It’s not just a character. It’s the MAIN character.
In Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Savannah plays itself. Like every other performance in the movie, it’s hammy and over-the-top and pitched to the cheap seats, a lusty cartoon of Southern Gothic at once ridiculous and ridiculously seductive.
Berendt’s book is subtitled A Savannah Story. Even without it, there’s no doubt as to what the movie adaptation is all about: Savannah, Georgia, the most flamboyantly Southern place on earth.
John Cusack, whose trademark once was likability and relatability but whose real-life persona as a clueless caricature of a self-important Hollywood liberal renders him less sympathetic these days, stars as the movie’s audience surrogate and author stand-in John Kelso.
Kelso is a struggling author from up north who flies to Savannah to write about Jim Williams’ famous Christmas party. The achingly bland New Yorker is overwhelmed by how damn COLORFUL everything is.
Eastwood seems to see Savannah the same way Cusack’s bland protagonist does: as a crazy Southern Gothic nightmare/dream so exotic and otherworldly that its denizens might as well be space aliens from the Planet Gleep Glorp.
At the party everyone drinks excessively and waves around their guns and then, in an entirely predictable development, someone ends up getting shot and killed. The unfortunate soul in question is twenty-one year old hustler Billy Hanson, who Jude Law plays as a near-feral brute revered by both men and women for his sexual prowess, and the man doing the shooting is Hanson’s lover and benefactor Jim.
Jim claims that he killed the much younger man in self-defense after he confronted him in a rage while drunk and high and he pulled a gun on him but the truth proves more slippery and elusive.
John, who describes Savannah to his boss as “Gone With the Wind on Mescaline”, decides there’s a book to be written about the case and its exceedingly, excessively, exhaustingly colorful setting.
In this capacity, John strikes up an odd couple friendship with The Lady Chablis, a flamboyant cabaret performer who became a central figure in Berendt’s novel and as well as an LGTBQ and trans icon.
For this flashy role of central importance, Eastwood did something casually radical: he hired the actual woman Berendt wrote about to play herself in the movie, only a decade and a half younger.
Eastwood clearly fell in love with her as a performer and a human being because he gave her the freedom to completely steal the movie with her atomic presence, magnetism and charisma. When she’s onscreen, this becomes the Lady Chablis Smile Time Variety Hour, a honey-dripping variety show full of music, one-liners, sass, flamboyant costumes and kooky comedy that half-forgets that it’s supposed to be a crime drama.
The Lady Chablis is so inherently real and spectacular and fascinating that she can’t help but make her lame white writer sidekick seem even more boring and generic by comparison.
Directing is largely a matter of choices. One of the most important choices is what to keep and what to cut. Alas, Eastwood invariably seems to have erred on the side of leaving EVERYTHING in.
It feels like Eastwood shot every scene in the screenplay, no matter how lumpy, irrelevant, long or narratively unnecessary, then kept every scene he filmed exactly as he shot it.
The result is a shapeless, meandering, two and a half hour long mess overflowing with scenes and supporting characters angrily begging for the cutting room floor, most notably an absolutely pointless, arbitrary love story for John pairing our white-bread hero with, you guessed it, an utterly forgettable romantic interest played by Alison Eastwood, the director’s daughter.
You might find this hard to believe, but this twenty-three year old Clint Eastwood movie about black, queer life in the Deep South is not terribly subtle or nuanced in its depiction of gay life in the Reagan-era Georgia.
Watching Eastwood bumble his way through this very Southern story I found myself wishing that a genuine Southerner with a feel for the people, language and culture of the South like Richard Linklater had made it instead.
Then I realized that Linklater HAS made this movie. It was called Bernie and it was similarly about a gay man whose sexual preference is an open secret to everyone around him, a real-life murder trial and the complicated sexual politics and culture of the Deep South.
And it was fucking great! If you haven’t seen it, go see Bernie. If you have seen it, why not watch it again? I’ve seen it four or five times.
Bernie is infinitely better and truer than this bloated, shapeless mess, as fascinatingly weird as it might sometimes be.
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