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Midnight rambler

Clint's Garden fails to bloom

by Peter Keough

** MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by John Lee Hancock based on the book by John Berendt. With Kevin Spacey, John Cusack, Jude Law, Jack Thompson, Paul Hipp, Alison Eastwood, Irma B. Hall, and the Lady Chablis. A Warner Bros. release. At Framingham, the Solomon Pond Hoyt 15, and the Worcester North Showcase.

John Berendt's nonfiction bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil boasts an elegant title and a haunting jacket

illustration, but when it comes to good and evil, the book is strictly garden variety. A soupçon of the quaintnesses and eccentricities of 1980s Savannah flavored by a sensational murder case, it's an armchair travelogue with a whiff of Southern Gothic.

Adapted by Clint Eastwood, who fared so well with slight material in his The Bridges of Madison County, and with a screenplay by John Lee Hancock, who wrote Eastwood's problematic A Perfect World, the film version achieves a little more coherence and focus, and its performances are for the most part savory and engrossing. Like the book, though, this Garden remains merely decorative, neither firmly rooted nor offering much in the way of bloom.

John Cusack is alternately endearing and annoying -- far too often he resorts to a reaction shot of dropped-jaw incredulity -- in the John Berendt (here John Kelso) role. He's a New York City journalist who visits the misty, mossy old city of Savannah to cover a party for Town & Country magazine (just one of many variations from the original text). It's the annual shindig held by Jim Williams, a nouveau riche antiques dealer and real-estate tycoon who's made his fortune renovating Savannah's decaying period townhouses. Played by Kevin Spacey in a silky moustache and with a bourbony, insinuating drawl, Williams exudes seductiveness and menace. In his first scene with Cusack, where he reveals that he'd specifically asked that Kelso cover the event, the predatory, homoerotic tension is palpable.

Not for long, though. Dramatic dynamics dissipate into quaint and coy cameos by the oddball locals. They include a man with live horseflies leashed to his clothing with threads, a fellow who walks an invisible dog, and the Lady Chablis (played by herself), a frighteningly gaunt and crude drag queen who looks like a cross between Eartha Kitt and Don Knotts. Such bonbons might be diverting in the laid-back, anecdotal format of the original text, but they're inert and inconsequential in a film. When violence strikes, with Williams shooting his hopped-up, brutish young handyman/lover, Billy Hanson (Jude Law), it hardly makes any more of an impression than all the other offbeat sketches.

Eastwood and Hancock wisely deviate from the book at this point, which has its narrator remain detached and colorless. Instead, Kelso becomes actively involved in Williams's attempt to prove the shooting was self-defense. Hoping to get a book out of the deal, and perhaps vaguely drawn to the enigmatic, sexually ambiguous Williams, Kelso works for the accused's good-ol'-boy lawyer, Sonny Seiler (Jack Thompson, sweet and smooth as a mint julep), and sets out on an investigation of his own.

What follows is a game attempt to harness Garden's odds and ends to a half-baked film noir. Kelso's trail leads him back to the increasingly irritating Lady Chablis, to a gratuitously inserted black cotillion ball, to various graveyard expeditions with a voodoo priestess named Minerva (Irma P. Hall), and finally to the city morgue -- this last in tow with Mandy (Clint's daughter Alison Eastwood, who doesn't embarrass herself but should lay off the singing), his perfunctorily tagged-on love interest.

After more than two and a half hours of this, he still doesn't get to the heart of the mystery -- because there isn't any. Although the film hints at issues like the elusive nature of truth and guilt, the corrupting effect of decadence and isolation, and the lures and pitfalls of sexual obsession, they're mere window dressing in its restored 18th-century colonial façade.

As an investigation of moral ambiguity, Garden is merely murky. It should have been otherwise, for Eastwood has shown in such masterpieces as Tightrope and Unforgiven a profound sense of the gradations of good and evil, of culpability and innocence. Moral ambiguity, though, is one thing; narrative ambiguity is another. And without a strong story line and a solid protagonist and antagonist, Eastwood is adrift. Some other director might have brought to life this confection box of quirky characters and episodes -- David Lynch, perhaps, stoking the mild weirdness into something truly grotesque and surreal and genuinely partaking of good and evil. But Eastwood should have thought twice before being led down the Garden path.

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Tending his Garden

WHEREAS sensational murder trials have electrified audiences from the days of Sacco and Vanzetti down to the O.J. Simpson case and that of our own British nanny, the trial in Clint Eastwood's adaptation of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is just part of the local color of Savannah. According to Eastwood, the new film has nothing to do with the current rage for courtroom melodrama or inquiries into the validity of American justice. It's just good storytelling.

"Whether it has anything to do with other trials, I don't know," he asserts. "They are sensationalized at the moment, but I don't think they'll have any bearing one way or the other. You might compare the tampering of the evidence and the shoddy police work to the way the defense tried to handle the O.J. case, but that's about the only comparison I can see.

"I was trying to show the quirkiness of John's [John Berendt's] book and not make it into a trial movie. Today we're raised with a lot of quick images on MTV or stories that are totally subservient to special effects, so I thought it was nice to go back to old-fashioned storytelling where you deal with characters. And in the case of John Berendt's characters, he seems to have made everybody very curious about Savannah.

"I tried to talk to a lot of the people who were characters in John's book. For instance, the guy with the flies tied to strings, I got to meet him, and he no longer does that. We all change. But he did do that at one time, and those kind of oddities are what make the book unique. There's a worldliness that is kind of crazy. But there's also a tolerance, and that's interesting too."

Tolerance and serenity loom large in Eastwood's life these days. Does the fact that Dirty Harry has made a movie sympathetic to gays and drag queens indicate he's changing?

"You mean, am I wearing lip gloss and eyeshadow? I've always considered myself tolerant of other people's lifestyles. But it's also fun to tell stories about things you don't understand. And there's something about the kind of people in Savannah who do their own thing, whether it's wearing flies or whether it's being a drag queen, whatever you want to do."

With tolerance comes peace of mind, and in Clint's case, a new family -- he and his second wife recently had a baby. Perhaps that's part of the reason Eastwood cast his daughter Alison in a small but pivotal role in Garden.

"I did make her audition," he points out. "When I did Tightrope some years ago, I thought about what happens if your daughter wasn't good in the picture and you had to fire her? What effect would that have on a child growing up, or on the father-daughter relationship? But it turned out she was excellent in that movie, and I felt she would be good in this one, but I wanted to make sure she went through the ropes."

If firing her would have been traumatic, how was it directing her in a love scene with John Cusack?

"It's nice to be there to chaperone the whole thing. We did it all in one take. That's part of the chaperoning."

Not all is serene in Eastwood's life, however. Former girlfriend Sondra Locke lacerated him recently in a tell-all memoir. Eastwood shakes off this and other attacks.

"A friend of mine the other day, who is about my age, said, `There's one great thing about being in your 60s -- what can they do to you?' It's like you've had good things said about you and you've had bad things said about you, and so at some point you become very philosophical and say that's an individual opinion. Even the people who said something good about you might be wrong, so you never know."

Like those who describe you as an icon?

"When you keep coming back after 40 or 50 years, I guess they figure they've got to call you something."