January 9–16, 1997

movie shorts

GHOSTS OF MISSISSIPPI

You've seen this movie before. In the past, it's been titled Mississippi Burning, A Time To Kill, Cry Freedom, etc., but the story is the same: a reluctantly heroic white-knight kind of guy (disguised — in a suit — as a fed,lawyer, writer) is moved beyond his immediate status-quo-preserving impulses to do the right thing. And as he is so moved, he takes the rest of the American South (however much it might be kicking and screaming) with him. He doggedly pursues justice,while enduring some unlikely action sequences (surviving explosions or gunfire as these externalize his internal state of guilt) and/or mounting a persuasive argument in a courtroom, so that the evil racists — who are never the imagined or intendedaudience for this movie — get what they deserve, a serious comeuppance. This version of this movie — Rob Reiner's drippy Ghosts of Mississippi — is the story of Bobby DeLaughter (Alec Baldwin), the assistant district attorney who won theconviction of white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith (James Woods) in 1994 for the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers. It probably goes without saying that this movie that you've seen is an annoying, narrow-minded, ahistorical, overly romantic one,and that these heroes are generally offensive fabrications. There's no doubt that the Evers story is compelling or that the filmmakers' intentions are good. Unfortunately, none of what the movie shows is astounding — the many awful forms ofinstitutional and individual racism are barely touched on. What's vexing about this version of this movie — aside from its clumsy storyline and cloying melodrama — is its particular claims to honesty and "history." It's suggesting thatrepresentational systems — legal, cultural, cinematic, political, social, economic — can be made to work, that justice can be done. I just saw Toni Cade Bambara and Louis Massiah's The Bombing of Osage Avenue, a documentary which makes thecase that, historically and currently, this is far from true. And that's not a history that anyone with the funding of a Rob Reiner will be documenting (or even fictionalizing) anytime soon.

— Cindy Fuchs

(AMC Olde City; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA Cheltenham; UA Sameric; UA 69th St.)