God Shall Enlarge Japheth, And He Shall Dwell In The Tents Of Shem; And Canaan Shall Be His Servant

Rating: 7/10 (20 September 2011)

When three young civil rights activists disappear in rural Mississippi in 1964, the FBI are called in to investigate. As racial tensions rise in a state which still has segregation, the local police department are implicated and the case becomes a media frenzy. Can the feds find the missing men and prove what happened ?
Mississippi Burning is an incendiary movie. It doesn't worry about whom it offends and it doesn't shy away from the most horrible aspects of its drama. It presents the good old Jim Crow redneck South in a manner guaranteed to upset pretty much everybody, and leaves itself wide open to criticism on a lot of fronts; why do the heroes have to white, why do the cops all have to be Ku Klux Klan members, why do the feds resort to exactly the kind of hateful violence and intimidation they're there to put an end to, do we really need to see people beaten, lynched and humiliated every ten minutes, and what qualifies British director Parker to depict American society in so negative a way ? All these are legitimate complaints, but the answer to them all is pretty simple - that's just the way things were. Segregation was a way of life. Black voter registration in places like (fictitious) Jessup County was almost negligible. The movie's key exchange is when Hackman says, "If I were a Negro I'd probably think the same way they do.", and Dafoe retorts, "If you were a Negro, nobody would give a damn what you thought.". It takes two points of view - Dafoe's idealism and Hackman's easy-going pragmatism - and turns them into each other, with McDormand as the lynch-pin in the middle, and all three performances are terrific. The supporting cast is very strong, with Dourif and Rooker in particular as two of the scariest cops in any movie. Peter Biziou's bright day / dark night photography (which won an Oscar) in authentic rural Mississippi locations adds to the tension, as does the grim score by Trevor Jones. It's an unpleasant film, but a brilliant one and no matter how you may react to it, it forces you to evaluate your own feelings about the issues and to recognise that America has always been a country with a huge gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Loosely based on the real-life Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murder case of 1964 in Neshoba County, albeit with much dramatic licence. This was the third in a great trio of strange and powerful dramas Parker made in the eighties (the other two being Birdy and Angel Heart), and is amongst his best work.