The Crushed Film Festival presents: Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil
by Mark Blankenship
The Movie: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
The Crush Object: Jude Law
The Story: Reporter John Kelso (John Cusack) thinks he’s got a simple assignment in Savannah, Georgia: cover a rich eccentric’s famous Christmas party, toss back an eggnog, head home.
But it turns out Jim Williams, the rich crazy guy, is also funny, flamingly gay, and played by (ahem) Kevin Spacey. When Williams’s wild-ass lover Billy (Jude Law) turns up dead, he gets the blame, and Kelso sticks around to cover the trial.
This leads to encounters with all sorts of wacky Southern characters, including the sassy drag queen Lady Chablis (playing himself).
For those who don’t remember, this movie is based on John Berendt’s memoir, which was so popular that it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for over four years. If you lived in the South like I did during this time, you got issued a copy in hardback, paperback, and audio book.
And because Berendt’s a subtle, generous writer, he makes the people of Savannah seem like people with outlandish tendencies…totally out there, but still real. Clint Eastwood’s movie version, however, can’t get enough of Broad Dixie Stereotypes, and it has so many moody atmosphere shots that you’d think Eastwood had just discovered you could shoot things at night.
But the movie isn’t terrible. Just boring and overlong.As you may have noticed, though, my crush object isn’t, say, Cusack, who plays the lead role. No, when this movie arrived on video in the late nineties, I rented it over and over just so I could keep watching the handful of scenes with Jude Law. Shirtless Jude runs and yells! Drunk Jude gets sassy! Rewind. Repeat.
The Backstory: Um…do I need to explain my crush on Jude Law, especially before he was outed as an inveterate nanny-fucker?
The embarrassing thing is not the crush, but the fact that Midnight spawned my fantasy of Jude Law being gay and southern. After watching it, I imagined how Jude and I would lock eyes on a humid Georgia afternoon, wordlessly share a Coca-Cola in a local drugstore, and then go neck on his screened-in porch.
You have no idea how developed this story became in my mind. At one point, it involved us picking out matching linen suits.
The Embarrassment Level: A Jude Law crush is more embarrassing in retrospect, since his philandering and male pattern balding have not served him well. And renting a movie multiple times just to watch the first ten minutes is pretty ludicrous. But both things are mitigated by Law’s undeniable late-’90s hotness. So if embarrassment is a box of Ritz Crackers, I’d say I’ve only eaten half the box.
Mark Blankenship is the proprietor of The Critical Condition.
Tags: Clint Eastwood John Berendt John Cusack Jude Law Kevin Spacey movies The Crushed Film Festival
Mark I’m just glad to know that other people invent whole other world scenarios that escalate to purchasing clothes. :)
I’m from Atlanta so of course I read the book multiple times. I have to say I’ve never seen the movie but I might check out the first 10 minutes just for fun!
Don’t blame you at all, Mark. I must’ve watched Music from Another Room (circa 2000) about thirty times, and that’s gotta be worse than this.
This is a great movie to watch at 3 am. And the scenes with Jude Law are fantastic eye candy.
I also loves the outrageousness of Lady Chablis. I have to admit I kind of want her wardrobe, and the guts to wear it.
I have to admit I watched this movie solely for Jack Thompson. Not because of any crush on him, but because I was totally fascinated by the whole idea of him doing an accent other than his own or Ocker. As it turned out, he kind of did his own with some flourishes from what I remember.
I loved the book, didn’t mind the movie.
Matching Linen Suits! I love it!
This was a terrible but beautiful movie, and I say this as someone who honeymooned in Savannah based on the book.
I actually Netflicked this a year or so back, as a part of my series, “Re-watching Movies I Haven’t Seen in Ten Years” – and am either sad or proud to admit that the best part of the re-viewing, for me, was discovering Michael Rosenbaum (“Smallville’s” Lex Luthor) as a witness in one short scene. Like Yul Brynner and Tom Hardy, Rosenbaum with hair was actually a relative letdown.
I’d have to agree that the WACKY CHARATERS GALORE assessment is definitely fair, and the film is a bit much, while simultaneously amounting to fairly little. Undeniably tasty Law, though.
Go Lady Chablis!
@Diane – I am with you on loving Michael Rosenbaum and really preferring him without hair, or at least a close crop.
I was on the Kevin Spacey/Michael Rosenbaum train when I rented this and wished there were more scenes with them together.
@tulip — It’s not just me with the clothing fantasies? Awesome!
Mark Blankenship says:
February 16, 2009 at 2:30 PM
@tulip — It’s not just me with the clothing fantasies? Awesome!
No. No it’s not. Hee.
As previously confessed here at TN, I had a hot dream in which Ted Danson bought me rain boots.
Me and the boys from Entourage (well, except Turtle, ew) maxing out Vince’s credit card.
I didn’t know it was possible to NOT have clothing fantasies. And I’m in no way a chicksie-shopaholic-cartoon-girl, but … clothes are the stuff we use to attract attention, sometimes; they’re the wrappings we have to ritually shed to *get* at one another; they’re the occasionally-fun-to-work-around items we don’t even have *time* to get rid of; they’re the messages we send and the flags we wave. Dang, clothing is such a part of mating, it’s GOTTA be a part of our fantasies.
And I wish I’d put a comma before “and the flags we wave” … d*mmit, d*mmit, d*mmit. Sorry, y’all.
The film’s a mess, but I did enjoy it at the time, and God know’s it’s more interesting than most of what Eastwood’s put on screen subsequently. I maintain a lingering affection for both Cusack and Spacey, and Jude Law was unquestionably beautiful, although his Southern accent does absolutely nothing for me.
(It’s not the accent itself, I hasten to point out – just that Law’s version of it is not convincing. My fantasies about Law include him in his Ripley outfits using his own accent, and a re-casting of Interview With the Vampire with Law as Lestat and a Benicio-del-Toro-circa-The-Usual-Suspects as Louis.)
Ahem. “God knows.” Errant apostrophe syndrome strikes!
I hate John Cusack like I hate telemarketing spiders with Fran Drescher’s voice. HATE. Wouldn’t look in my pantry to see him.
That said, the single most memorable bit in this movie–and the part that actually made me scream like a little girl–was the moment at the end, when Spacey’s character is on the floor and looks to see Law’s (ghost?) turn its head and grin at him. I STILL have horrible nightmares about that. It probably was meant to be funny, or ironic, or something along those lines, but it scared the crap out of me.
And another thing: I live about three hours west of Savannah, and never in my life did I think people actually had that Foghorn Leghorn accent…but they do in southern Georgia. Seriously. I’m a hillbilly, and we don’t sound like that, so it’s fun to laugh at each other.
For my fellow Tomato Nationalists who’d like to …ketchup a little further with Jude Law, may I most earnestly recommend Enemy at the Gates. I didn’t know who he was when I first saw it, all I knew was that he was gloriously beautiful – and I thought the movie was excellent.*
*N.B.: Apparently the Soviets had issues with the movie because of historical inaccuracies. IMAGINE THAT! Imagine that if you can; what are the chances of historical inaccuracies in a movie??? However, I thought it was entertaining and remarkably involving. Plus some glorious eye candy.
I saw this movie in France, on a home stay with a very nice French family. When my French “sister” and I returned to the house, her mother asked me what the movie was about. I still remember my brain desperately yet valiantly racing to assemble some combination of French words to explain the plot. I think I settled on “there was a murder, and John Cusack was a lawyer. It was very complicated.”
@MCB: Oh, well summarized! How did your French “sister” summarize it to her Mom, though?
@La BellaDonna — she sort of shrugged and said “Yes, it was very complicated. I don’t think I would see it again. You wouldn’t like it, Mom.” (I think they were dumbing down conversation a bit for my sake!)
(Also, I just realized that Cusack was the reporter, not the lawyer.)
@Erin W – ME TOO, OMG. The Piv and Martha Plimpton are excellent in that movie, but it also has Gretchen Mol and Jennifer Tilly and that combination is… ugh. Shirtless Jude Law makes up for SO MUCH.
@La BellaDonna
I saw Enemy at the Gates in theaters, and the only thing I remember about it is the scene where Jude Law and Rachel Weisz have furtive sex. And at the time, I remember thinking that the filmmakers had wasted a perfectly good opportuntiy to have Jude remove his shirt.
So… God. Retrospectively, this was a seriously embarrassing period.
[…] they ever watched… just so they could see their Hollywood crush on screen. I wrote about my embarrassing love affair with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was spurred by my boundless desire to see Jude […]
So I was the only won who was relieved and, dare I say it, happy when the Jude Law character was offed, right? I had much the same reaction in The Talented Mr. Ripley – Law just annoys me to no end. (Sorry, Mark.) Dickie Wossname gets his brains turned to fishbait, and one lone voice in the theatre cheers. “Finally! God.” (I was glared at with eloquent fierceness, believe me.) Enemy At The Gates was all right, I think, despite its historical inaccuracies. To say nothing of the principals’ seeming remarkably un-Russian.
@Jaybird: “telemarking spiders with Fran Drescher’s voice” – hee. That’s a thing of beauty, that is.
Am I the only one who thinks Jude Law, while generally lovely to behold, was incredibly unattractive in Midnight in the Garden? I almost didn’t recognize him. His hair looked like it had been dyed with Sharpie ink and his terrifying tantrums made me relieved to see him exit the scene. If drooling is your object, you’d do better to watch The Holiday on mute.