| I had no idea this (screenplay by John Lee Hancock) was based on a book by John Berendt which was based on a true story until the end. Knowing that makes me forgive a great deal of the content that seemed extraneous and irrelevant at the time I was watching. |
| John Cusack is a reporter invited to Savannah to cover Kevin Spacey's famous Christmas party for Town & Country magazine, and intrigue ensues. Sometimes director Clint Eastwood became too enamored of all the wonderful and interesting characters that inhabit Savannah (which apparently has no normal people) and forgot about Spacey and Cusack. No matter - many of them were nice diversions and actually part of the story, but it felt like a traveler's diary (which I presume the book actually was). It was languid and genteel and very tonal, and never really broke out of that tempo. But it was never boring. I had high expectations for watching Kevin Spacey and John Cusack match their considerable wits and acting chops on screen, but they fizzled a bit in my eyes. |
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Spacey brought nothing new to this performance from his other esteemed ones except a sweet Georgia drawl, and John Cusack, chewing another man's words, never felt quite at home (to me). I also realize that Spacey's onscreen gift is that he looks like he is always thinking something you will never be allowed to know; Cusack looks like he is feeling something and you feel it as he does, never before. Together they are just gazing at each other, thinking and feeling but not really doing anything. |
| A romance with Alison Eastwood seems tacked on and unimportant (even if it really happened) and only serves as a motivation for her to help Cusack in the 3rd reel. |
| Cusack has the best line to describe this film in the movie itself: It's like Gone with the Wind on Mescaline. Jude Law has an odd, small part, as a rebel-flag tattooed bad boy, his lovely English accent all but gone as he swaggers about in tight Wranglers. Irma P. Hall is a voo doo woman with a prominent role; someone suggested she was the moral center of the film. Perhaps so, but the meandering, nay, ambling nature of the narrative was interrupted by her upbeat, jolly magicks. |
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Many things happened with little explanation, and with little consequence or effect. It's interesting but not fascinating, it's good but not great. I didn't want to read the book afterward, but I was not sorry I was introduced
to all these people. It felt like a decent meal at a restaurant in a town you will never visit again.
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