Nice drama, conjectural history.

Rating: 7/10 (13 April 2007)

Willem DaFoe is a by-the-book FBI investigator and is assisted by ex-Southern-sheriff Gene Hackman in the real-life inquiry into the deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. The three kids disappeared. No one, black or white, is willing to cooperate with the "Hoover boys" that poke around in the small town's business. The blacks won't cooperate because they're afraid, the whites for more obvious reasons. And some less obvious ones. As the clued-in Hackman puts it, "They have to live here long after we're packed up and gone." Just about every character is a stereotype that's played out like a card in a hand of bridge. The head of the local Ku Klux Klan, who calls himself "a local businessman" is a balding nincompoop who hates not just blacks but Papists and Jews and probably Brobdignagians. He doesn't have a family. Not even a dog or a cat as far as we can tell. The other heavies, including the prototypical redneck Michael Rooker with his frozen sneer, don't have families either, except for Deputy Brad Dourif, who has a wife. But he only has a wife so that the movie can show us that not all Southern whites are murdering racists. Some are sweet and lovable and attractive, in the way that Carol Burnett is attractive, and, as just about sublimely played by Frances McDormand, are so haunted by distaste for these illegal caste-ridden shenanigans that she's able and willing to squeal to Gene Hackman's FBI agent about the murders. That indiscretion gets her clobbered.
The performances are all good and some are splendid. Hackman could not be better. Every move he makes, every line of dialog, carries weight. DaFoe's character is less colorfully delineated. McDormand is outstanding, and so are Rooker, Dourif, and the guy who plays the KKK head. (What a trio of villains.) The tobacco-chewing Sheriff is great in a small supporting role.
When the FBI is stretched to its official limits without results, Hackman is given license to use his own methods. Enter two unofficial FBI heavies. One is a balding red-head with bulging eyes who has since made a career out of playing serial murderers. The other is a huge black guy with an ominous and resonant baritone who threatens to castrate the Mayor unless he spills the beans, which the Mayor does, leading to almost all the desired convictions.
The direction is tasteful. When the decomposing corpses are uncovered, it's in long shot. When Dourif beats hell out of McDormand, we only get a few introductory blows before the cut, just so we know what's going to happen next.
Location shooting is evocative. It's a convincing small Southern town shimmering in the summer heat. Most "Southern" scene -- the silent guy on the Choctaw reservations who is carving up catfish. The characters, although they may as well carry sandwich boards advertising their function in the script, are pretty well drawn.
If there's a problem with the film it's that it is laid out like a dramatic movie in the usual form of rising climaxes. The payoffs towards the end simply don't fit in with the otherwise realistic depiction of events. I did not for a moment believe that undercover FBI agents were brought in to kidnap the Mayor and threaten to cut off his family jewels. That belongs to a movie script, or to some black hole of a CIA prison in Bulgaria, not to a narrative that purports to be based on an historic event.
The final impression the film leaves you with is how surprisingly easy it is for a deeply felt and thoroughly entrenched set of values to change so quickly. A generation has passed, only a generation, since the governor of Mississippi's neighboring state stood in the doorway of the university and proclaimed, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." The situation displayed here, in 1964, isn't perfect now. Nothing is perfect. But it's a hell of a lot better than it was then. This is actually a curiously mixed blessing. It leaves Southern white people with still another defeat that they must get over. And it leaves blacks with a great deal of anti-white resentment that has no place to go.