Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)

Clint Eastwood's 1997 adaptation of John Berendt's bestseller arrives in Savannah with the patience of a man who has decided that atmosphere is its own reward. The camera lingers on Spanish moss and wrought iron, the locals speak in unhurried cadences, and a murder trial unfolds at the pace of a garden tour. It is a film about a killing that would prefer to be a film about cocktails. We are asked to admire eccentricity, and we do, mostly because the alternative is to notice how little happens.

The film's most progressive gesture is also its most incidental. The Lady Chablis, a real transgender entertainer, plays herself, and the performance is allowed to be brash, funny, and entirely unexamined. Jim Williams stands trial for shooting his young male lover, and his homosexuality is presented as one more piece of Savannah furniture, known to everyone and discussed by no one. There is no advocacy here, no lesson, no moment where the screenplay turns to the audience and explains what we ought to feel. The film records a closeted millionaire and his circle, and trusts us to keep up.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. Minerva the root doctor and the Black supporting cast lend texture without commentary. Williams's wealth is celebrated, not indicted. The eccentrics are played for Southern-gothic charm, not diagnosed. No one lectures us about the environment, the body, or the republic. What remains is a slow, handsome, faintly melancholic picture that treats its themes as weather. It is the rare film content to let its social consciousness sit in the shade, sipping something cold, saying nothing.