Underestimated

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2004)

Well, I guess this is why movies are so personal to the viewer.
I've read some of the other comments here and have seen words like "condescending" and "mediocre."
I couldn't disagree more. "Mississippi Burning" is an intellectually challenging movie. It demands that you immerse yourself in the worst of southern culture, whether you like it or not.
Based on a true story, the film takes place in 1964 (my birth year, incidentally) in a small town ugly and virulent with racism. The good ol' boy sheriff and his stoolies ambush and in cold blood murder three civil rights workers. The world's a-changing, but the power-brokers in this place refuse to let that happen. They'll do anything to prevent blacks from taking their rightful place at the table - literally.
The FBI sends a couple of mismatched agents in to search for the three missing young men. One agent (Hackman) is 'old school', sly, and knows his enemies a little too well. The other (Dafoe) is a naive Kennedy fire-eater, ready to bring the full force of the FBI and military down upon this small town's head. Although he is easy to underestimate at first, he grows into his role, showing astonishing decisiveness and strength.
The relationship between the town's blacks and whites is complicated and fraught with rules - spoken and unspoken. It's a not-so-secret secret that the civil rights workers have been murdered. Hackman and Dafoe just have to get the bodies and the evidence, that's all. Fear and loathing prevent that from happening, until the wife of a deputy (the amazing Frances McDormand) throws herself on the fire and blows her slimy husband's alibi.
There is justice - of a sort - in the end. It's not enough. Real change crawls on it's belly in the south.
"Mississippi Burning" is a movie of operatic gestures. The script is spongey with regional color and snappy, powerful dialogue.
Hackman and McDormand are simply magical. They don't take or make a false step from the first frame to the last. As she would go on to prove in later films, McDormand doesn't just 'play' a character - she IS that character. And Hackman is never more affecting that in this film. One syllable from him is more subtle than an entire Shakespeare speech when delivered by a lesser actor. Hackman is a national treasure.
IMO, Dafoe is a well-meaning revelation until circumstances forces him to cave into Hackman's just-get-it-done ways. He comes to see that idealism must relent to pragmatism in extreme cases, although that knowledge repulses him. He wants nothing more than to get out of the south and go home to a world he believes is cleaner and more simple.
The conclusion of "Mississippi" is more bitter than sweet. The guilty are arrested and convicted, although their various punishments are a joke. (R. Lee Ermey is the only one in the bunch who meets a just fate.) McDormand is brutally beaten to within an inch of her life for betraying the status quo and doing the right thing. Although she and Hackman have fallen in love, she refuses to leave with him because "this" - gesturing to the vandalized ruins of the house she was born in - "is my home."
I know the history, and I know this movie inside and out. And yet I still bawl like a baby every time I see it. The power of this film and the fact that "Mississippi" is based on ACTUAL EVENTS never fails to get to me.
"Mississippi Burning" has a place in my 'Top 50 Dramas.'