|
"What's that saying? Curiosity killed the Yankee?" Savannah enigmas, veils of gentility and madness. The event is a fancy Christmas party rocked by a crime passionnel, the freelancer from New York (John Cusack) smells a best-seller and sticks around, "it's like Gone With the Wind on mescaline." The dandified aesthete (Kevin Spacey) stands accused of murdering his rough-trade lover (Jude Law), his trial opens with a Hobbes quote and closes with an invocation of Perry Mason. Conducting his own investigation, the writer catalogs the flora and fauna of regional eccentricity. "Where are your manners?" Southern comfort and its collective artifice, Clint Eastwood helps himself to real locations and real personas in a spacious treatment. (The hybrid form stems from Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, and gets pushed to its limits in The 15:17 to Paris.) The community is the protagonist, verdant and placid and up to a point proud of its oddballs, who bounce off Cusack's blank deadpan for a calm surrealism throughout. The college mascot who poses for snapshots ("Dang good dog") and the bag lady with an oracular side (Irma P. Hall), the defense attorney who thrives on Dixie ham (Jack Thompson) and the barmy chemist with leashed horseflies and poison vial (Geoffrey Lewis). Above all, The Lady Chablis as herself, the gender-blurring diva presiding over the local cabaret, sashaying to "La Bamba" at the debutante ball, and purposefully unbalancing staid frames with bitchy mischief. "Still hiding my candy. Want me to unwrap it for you?" Ode to Johnny Mercer, parting visions on a bloodied Persian rug, the nature of truth like the canvas painted over. "I rather enjoy not knowing." Eastwood's The Sun Shines Bright, Altman responds at once with The Gingerbread Man. With Alison Eastwood, Paul Hipp, Kim Hunter, Bob Gunton, Richard Herd, Leon Rippy, Dorothy Loudon, Michael Rosenbaum, and Patrika Darbo.
--- Fernando F. Croce |