It is a shame that the film adaptation of John Berendt\u2019s \u201cMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil\u201d was not helmed by a director who thrives in the radically offbeat. In the hands of someone like David Lynch, Tim Burton or John Waters, the extraordinary wealth of eccentricity, depravity and old-fashioned freakiness would have flowered brilliantly.
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Alas, the project wound up in Clint Eastwood\u2019s stolid hands. \u201cMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil\u201d betrays all of the vices inherent to the Eastwood canon \u2013 an overlong running time, a fussy music score, miscasting, a heavy sense of artistic pretension \u2013 and none of the virtues.<\/p>\n
The problems with the film begin immediately with the reinvention of the bemused Berendt narrator in the book into the dim on-screen persona of \u201cJohn Kelso,\u201d played with utter cluelessness by John Cusack. Having the bland Kelso at the center of a zany Savannah story throws the project off balance \u2013 imagine a Marx Brothers movie centered around Zeppo and you\u2019ll have an idea how this film flows. Eastwood doesn\u2019t help matters by creating a new character named \u201cMandy\u201d who falls in love with Kelso \u2013 nor is it in the viewer\u2019s best interest that this lady is played by the young Alison Eastwood. (Guess how she got her job?)<\/p>\n
The larger-than-life characters that made Berendt\u2019s book so memorable are given smaller-than-life incarnations. Kevin Spacey\u2019s gay millionaire and Jude Law\u2019s rough-trade hustler come across like Acting 101 exercises, while Irma P. Hall\u2019s voodoo priestess is too benign for impact. Most curious is the cross-dressing cabaret performer The Lady Chablis playing himself\/herself. The poor Lady cannot act, and this individual’s sassy insouciance as described by Berendt is nowhere to be found on-screen.<\/p>\n
In Eastwood\u2019s best films, the blur between good and evil creates memorably deep emotional imbalance. And the joy of the Berendt book was the careful peeling back of the multiple layers of Savannah society to discover how money and hubris fogged up all notions of morality and justice.<\/p>\n
In this film, however, good and evil are both trumped by ennui. When Kelso calls his agent and describes his dreary surroundings as \u201c\u2018Gone with the Wind\u2019 on mescaline,\u201d it is not hard to wonder which film he is watching. Under Eastwood\u2019s guidance, \u201cMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil\u201d seems like alchemy in reverse \u2013 a golden property is turned into lead.<\/p>\n