SHOW BUSINESS, Page 56COVER STORY: Fire This TimeWith incendiary drama and a lightning pace, Mississippi Burningilluminates an ugly chapter in American history -- and stokes abitter debateBy Richard Corliss
A visitor to our community finds an old-fashioned welcome and
a degree of friendliness that exists in no other place . . .
Numerous lakes and ponds offer fine year-around fishing, and for
the hunter Neshoba County is a paradise.
-- Chamber of Commerce brochure, Neshoba County, Miss., 1964
Wasn't that a time? Each year of the early 1960s brought new
images of heroism and horror as the civil rights movement spread
through the South like kudzu. 1960: four Negro students sit in at
a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter. 1961: the Congress of Racial
Equality inaugurates its Freedom Rides to integrate Southern bus
terminals. 1962: in Oxford, Miss., James Meredith enters Ole Miss,
its first black student since Reconstruction.
And then, in 1963, the white arm of racism strikes back. May:
Birmingham public-safety commissioner "Bull" Connor turns his dogs
and his fire hoses on demonstrators. June: in Jackson, Miss.,
Medgar Evers is murdered. September: four black children are killed
in a Birmingham church bombing. The following summer promised the
climax to a melodrama that would be scored to either We Shall
Overcome or Mississippi Goddam.
Or both. In 1964 Arthur Ashe won the U.S. Open, Martin Luther
King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And on June 19 the U.S.
Senate passed its landmark Civil Rights Bill. But two days later,
three civil rights workers -- two Northern whites, Michael
Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and a Southern black, James Chaney
-- were arrested for speeding in Philadelphia, Miss., then jailed
and later released into the night. They were never again seen
alive.
For the next six weeks, FBI agents blanketed the area, quizzing
the friendly folks of Neshoba County. Reporters from all over
tested the residents' hospitality. Navy frogmen fished the lakes
and ponds, searching for evidence of the local hunters' blood
sport. In August, thanks to a $30,000 payoff to an informant, the
FBI discovered the bodies in a new earth dam. Four months later,
the Philadelphia sheriff, his deputy and 17 others were arrested,
and in 1967 seven of the 19 (including the deputy but not his boss)
were convicted of conspiracy to murder.
Triumph and heartbreak abound in this story, but it has taken
Hollywood nearly a quarter-century to put it on the big screen. Now
it is here with a bang. Mississippi Burning, Orion Pictures' $15
million drama about the FBI's search for the murderers of
Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, has arrived with critical trumpets
leading the way and bitter controversy in its wake. It has already
won National Board of Review citations for best picture, best actor
(Gene Hackman) and best supporting actress (Frances McDormand) --
prizes the film may duplicate on Academy Award night. For
Mississippi Burning is made to Oscar's order: a white-heat yarn
that illuminates, with fiery rhetoric at a lightning pace, one
crucial chapter in American history.
Next week, when Mississippi Burning expands from nine theaters
to more than 500, moviegoers will get to see what all the shouting
is about. For more than two hours, director Alan Parker splatters
grotesque and gorgeous images on his large canvas. Indomitable
black preachers lead services in the charred husks of their
churches. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan mass for a venomous camp
meeting. And everywhere there is the blaze of torch-song tragedy
as black schools and shacks crumble in the embers of the Klan's
fury.
As the leader of the FBI team, Willem Dafoe (who played the
martyred sergeant in Platoon and the humanist Jesus in The Last
Temptation of Christ) is a stick of righteousness waiting to
explode. But the movie also finds recesses where human dignity and
compassion wait to be summoned. It is alert to the shifting
emotional weight and moral responsibilities in any relationship,
especially in the quiet interplay of Hackman and McDormand, two
ordinary middle-aged people searching awkwardly to be of use to
each other. Hackman caps a brilliant career here as an FBI agent
that both J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King Jr. could love.
He takes the measure of this film: a watchmaker's craftsmanship,
a marathoner's doggedness. With every confident frame, Mississippi
Burning announces itself as a big, bold bolt of rabble-rousin',
rebel-razin' movie journalism.
Or is it just movie fantasy, and meretricious to boot? That is
the source of a debate over the film's veracity and verism -- a
controversy echoing the rumpus over The Last Temptation of Christ,
but with politics, not theology, as the sticking point. Mississippi
Burning is a fiction based on fact; it invents characters and bends
the real-life plot; it colors in the silhouette of events with its
own fanciful strokes and highlights. In focusing on the agents,
Parker and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo italicize the gumshoe heroism
of white officials while downplaying the roles of black and white
visionaries who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives to help
fashion a free America.
Thus the film has drawn accusations that it falsifies an era.
"The film treats some of the most heroic people in black history
as mere props in a morality play," says Vernon Jarrett, the only
black on the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board. James Chaney's
younger brother Ben, who was eleven in 1964 and is portrayed in the
movie, finds the Mississippi mirror distorting: "The movie makes
the FBI too good to be true. It is a dangerous movie because it
could lead to complacency. Things haven't changed that much." Says
David Halberstam, who covered the 1964 Freedom Summer for the New
York Times: "Parker has taken a terribly moving and haunting story
and he has betrayed it, turned it into a Martin-and-Lewis slapstick
between the two cops. It's a bad movie: `Mississippi False.' "
Parker dismisses all indictments: "Our film isn't about the
civil rights movement. It's about why there was a need for a civil
rights movement. And because it's a movie, I felt it had to be
fictionalized. The two heroes in the story had to be white. That
is a reflection of our society as much as of the film industry. At
this point in time, it could not have been made any other way."
The charges are not trivial, and neither is the challenge. At
issue is the freedom of a filmmaker -- or any artist -- to twist
the facts as they are recalled, to shape the truth as it is
perceived. May a movie libel the historical past? And has
Mississippi Burning done so? Artistic liberty vs. social
responsibility: the stakes are high. The memories are indelible.
The battle lines are drawn.
Another battle film helped Mississippi Burning come to life.
Two years ago Orion's Platoon ripped the scabs off the wound of
Viet Nam, copped lots of Oscars and grossed close to $300 million
worldwide. Any successful movie creates a new market, and studios
-- especially Orion, which has a rep for taking chances on
political pictures -- were soon scrambling for the next Platoon.
Cynicism is served with a twist in Hollywood, and Mississippi
Burning has taken its licks as a ready-made Big Issue blockbuster.
Before its release, even Hackman gibed that its producers "looked
at how much Platoon made and they went, `Yeah! What other causes
can we make some money on?' "
Platoon was lucky. It dodged the bullets that Mississippi
Burning has walked into. Nobody mistook it for a documentary. Few
criticized it for ignoring or caricaturing the Vietnamese. Instead,
Americans recognized and responded to the grandeur of its
hallucinogenic fever. Platoon was crazy from the inside, a
surrealist's scribbled message from hell. Parker's film is quite
another thing: an outsider's report, not autobiography but
psychodrama, with a texture as real as newsreel. And yet its plot
skeleton bears similarities to Platoon. In both films, two strong
men fight to establish American values in a hostile country, and
to claim the soul of an innocent. In both films, the local
nonwhites -- yellow or black -- are less a group of dramatic
characters than a plot device, a shadow, a chorus, a landscape, an
idea.
As Mississippi Burning opens, three civil rights workers ride
through Jessup (Neshoba) County, avid to get out of town. Their
station wagon is overtaken by some good ole boys in a pickup truck.
Blam! Blam! Blam! Officially, the three are "missing." FBI agents
Ward (Dafoe) and Anderson (Hackman) know otherwise. They might be
from two different colleges -- say, Harvard and Hard Knocks. But
they are both feds in a bad town, and they know what smells. The
sheriff, for one. "You down here to help us solve our nigger
problem?" he asks agreeably. No. They are there to wash some soiled
linen: the bloodstained sheets of the local Klansmen, who almost
certainly executed the young men for the crime of idealism.
Ward was in Oxford with James Meredith; he was shot in the
shoulder for his protective pains. Yet he seems criminally naive
about race relations in the South. In a luncheonette he quizzes a
young black; that night the youth is tortured. Ward's way is to
send his agents wading solemnly through a Jessup swamp in their
dark gray suits, looking for all the world like a lost patrol of
Blues Brothers. The result is only frustration and conflagration,
as Negro churches, schools, shacks go up in flames. Anderson, a
native Mississippian, knows how to talk to the natives: threaten
the men, seduce the women. He will take a razor to the neck of
Deputy Sheriff Pell (Brad Dourif). He will take flowers to Mrs.
Pell (McDormand), who functions as the town's guilty conscience.
Her husband ignores and abuses her; now she has the chance to
shackle him in the handcuffs of her hatred.
This is one of Mississippi Burning's two main fictional
conceits: that the FBI broke the case in part by locating not the
fear and greed of a Klan informant, but the flinty, vindictive soul
of Southern integrity. The other conceit is as low-road as the plot
twist in a kung fu scuzzathon. The film imagines that the FBI
imported a free-lance black operative to terrorize the town's mayor
into revealing the murderers' names. Taken (like much else in the
picture) from a report in William Bradford Huie's 1965 casebook,
Three Lives for Mississippi, the scene invariably gooses a cheer
out of its audience -- almost a rebel yell. But its grizzly
machismo represents an '80s-movie solution to a '60s for-real
enigma: Dirty Harry beats dirty laundry.
That is not so far from screenwriter Gerolmo's original
conception, more than four years ago, of Mississippi Burning: a
political parable with western overtones, perhaps to star William
Hurt and Clint Eastwood. "Hurt would represent the idealistic
approach, and Eastwood the violent response," says Gerolmo, 35.
"The film would be similar to John Ford's 1962 western, The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance. It's a movie that asks some serious questions
about using violence in the name of the law." Initially then,
Gerolmo might have meant the FBI's terrorist tactics to be seen
critically, or at least ambivalently. But he must have known that
American movie audiences want the thrill without the filigree. He
must also remember the famous advice from a newspaperman in Liberty
Valance, which sums up the approach Mississippi Burning would take
to Mississippi history: "When the legend becomes fact, print the
legend."
Gerolmo took the idea to his friend Frederick Zollo, an
off-Broadway producer-director, who sold it to Orion. Several
directors were proposed -- Milos Forman, John Schlesinger -- before
Orion suggested Alan Parker, 44. His films (Midnight Express, Fame,
Birdy) resist classification by content, but in style they are as
easy to spot as a fist in your face. Bang on! That is both Parker's
strength and limitation, which has the dervish precision of the ace
London commercials director he once was. But he had never made a
film with such daunting logistics as this one.
"I knew the moment I read it," he says, "that it was a powerful
story. What I did was to strengthen the social and political point
of view, strengthen the characters, strengthen the overall quality
of the film." And once shooting started, Parker took over, as a
director will. The Writers Guild strike required that Gerolmo
absent himself from the set; Parker apparently concurred in that
ruling. Gerolmo's final arbitration: "The screenplay is mine, but
the movie is Alan's. That's the way the world works out here."
Parker's great challenge was making the world of his movie work
in Mississippi. He and co-producer Robert Colesberry stalked 300
towns as likely locations, with the director impishly yelling,
"Alabama Burning?" "Georgia Burning?" "Arkansas Burning?" But he
selected Mississippi -- to the delight of the state film
commission, which was willing to display its old racist scowl in
implicit contrast to its fresh new face of many colors.
The director's previous movie, Angel Heart, was set in the
Louisiana '50s and boasted a gallery of fine black faces. Now he
was moving forward a decade and north a few hundred miles; the
demands for local color were just as stringent. "Alan wanted real
Southern black faces," recalls location casting director Shari
Rhodes, "or a British director's idea of what a Southern face looks
like. Pretty people need not apply." Rhodes was looking for dark
skin, strong bone structure, "dignity." She visited nursing homes,
prowled the streets of black neighborhoods and hired homeless men
for walk-ons. She had studied photographs of civil rights marchers
and wanted similar faces -- "people who had been dragged off bar
stools. All their faces said, `I have been through some pain.' "
One Sunday Rhodes and Colesberry went to a small church in
Jackson. "We were the only white faces in the whole church," she
recalls. "At the end of the service, the deacon stood up and said,
`We have some politicians who would like to say a few words to
you.' Everybody looked at us, and we shook our heads. `You mean
you're not politicians? Then praise the Lord!' And the whole church
started laughing." The choir and its soloist, Lannie Spann McBride,
perform the film's final funeral anthem.
In a way, the filmmakers were politicians: they would be using
the new Mississippi to depict the old. Mostly, the shooting
proceeded without incident. Sometimes, though, old images must have
haunted the older townsfolk. One day Colesberry spotted one of the
crew's pickup trucks toting a huge Klan cross through town and had
the driver cover it up. During the ten-week shoot, derelict
churches and other structures were set ablaze; production paused
while the ashes cooled down. One evening the company assembled to
film the burning of a local black church, which had been bought and
would be rebuilt to the congregation's specifications. "It was
freezing that night," recalls Bob Penny, who played the role of one
of the white conspirators, "and it was frightening. As the church
burned, you could literally hear the silence of the people. At one
point Parker shouted out his usual `Don't act! Stop acting!,' and
I said, `I ain't acting -- I'm scared!'"
Hackman and Dafoe kept a respectful distance, as befit their
roles. Dafoe snuggled into his character, "an idealist who changes
in the face of violence. One of the things that attracted me to
Ward was that I believed him. I believe there were idealists like
him in politics, the FBI and the Justice Department. The film is
in part a meditation on what's happened to that kind of idealism."
Hackman stayed busy tapping memories of Danville, Ill. "Growing up
in a Midwestern small town," he explains, "helped me identify with
Anderson. I felt as if I'd seen enough of those kinds of guys. I
knew the territory -- the way a small-town sheriff operates."
Maybe, though, things have changed since Hackman's boyhood --
at least in the South. Not long ago, Mississippians were killed
for showing their faces and speaking up. Last spring, though,
Mississippians were paid to do the same things for Burning. For
some viewers, the film's most moving line will be found in the
closing credits: "We would especially like to thank Governor Ray
Mabus . . . and the people of Mississippi . . . for their kind
cooperation in the making of this film."
Once every 20 years or so, Hollywood sets a film in Mississippi
and explores the race problem in a big way: Intruder in the Dust
(1949), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Mississippi Burning now.
At other times it is content to play Rip van Winkle. If Parker's
film is taking so much heat now, the reason is partly that U.S.
filmmakers have stayed away in droves from the front lines of
racial controversy. Ironically, the few Hollywood films that do
investigate a smoldering political issue tend to be directed by
foreigners. "American filmmakers love making escapist films,"
Parker says. "They never worry that they should be trying something
else. So they haven't fought to make serious films, and the studios
haven't made them, and American audiences have been educated to
avoid them. It's not that these directors are seduced by the
system. They are the system."
It has ever been thus. During the 1964 freedom marches and race
murders, America could be seen tearing itself apart at the soul --
on TV, that is. On the big screen, Edwardian England was all the
rage, in 1964's top hit (Mary Poppins) and top Oscar winner (My
Fair Lady). While whites killed blacks in the South, and blacks
torched their ghettos in the North, moviemakers wrangled with
knottier dilemmas. Had Elvis finally run out of resort locations
for his musical travelogues? Would Doris Day ever lose her
virginity?
So Hollywood's few significant forays into the Magnolia State
are worth a peek. The first look should be the longest. Intruder
in the Dust, based on William Faulkner's novel and filmed in
Oxford, dared to elicit the white viewer's admiration for a
defiantly dignified -- in those days the word was uppity -- black
man named Lucas (Juano Hernandez) accused of killing a white. Like
Mississippi Burning, Intruder ends with a finger-pointing speech:
"Lucas wasn't in trouble," says a white lawyer. "We were." But its
lasting touch is in its portrayal of a black who refuses to play
either martyr or Tom; in the war between the races, Lucas is a very
conscientious objector. "He's got to admit he's a nigger," a
townsman truculently insists. "Then maybe we will accept him as he
seems to intend to be accepted."
One turbulent generation later, in In the Heat of the Night,
a black detective showed up in Mississippi (stunt-doubled by
Illinois) and refused to admit that he was anything but Sidney
Poitier. This Oscar-winning film prefigured the antagonistic-buddy
configuration of Mississippi Burning and a quillion other cop
movies: a blustering Southern lawman (Rod Steiger) learns to
respect, and win the respect of, a wily straight arrow from the
North. The difference, though, is telling. Three years after
Philadelphia, a movie could send a black man to Mississippi to
solve a white crime. But not 24 years after.
Which is not to force old molds, noble or otherwise, on
Mississippi Burning. It is simply to agree with Parker that the
film is as much a reflection of attitudes in today's Hollywood, and
in the rest of America, as it is a window on the 1964 South. In
last year's presidential campaign, blacks were once again America's
invisible men. Faced with the electorate's comfortable cynicism,
Democrats chose not to evoke sympathy for the poor black (hence the
virtual disappearance of Jesse Jackson), while Republicans chose
to exploit fear of the rapacious black (hence the toxic stardom of
Willie Horton). Why should Hollywood be more progressive than
Peoria? Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy are two of the past decade's
biggest stars, but they are still only comic relief. In serious
films the minority presence is fainter than it was two and three
decades ago, when Poitier was the only black king in the pack.
Hollywood is not a place but a state of mind. A filmmaker need
not shop on Rodeo Drive to be influenced by the current social
conservatism. Two recent British films, Cry Freedom and A World
Apart, took deadly aim at South Africa's apartheid; yet their
heroes were white. In Mississippi Burning too, the drama arises
from a white's discovery of injustice toward black people. The hero
is someone with whom the white audience can identify, someone with
something to lose, someone who suffers only by his compassion for
the afflicted. By this rule, every picture about blacks becomes a
metaphor for the white man's burden. And the black man's burden is
to be a supplicant to Superman, or Bleeding-Heartman. Or, this time
around, Hackman.
Unhappy the movie industry that needs to invent white heroes
and suppress black ones. Unhappier still the people who demand that
one film -- in this case, Mississippi Burning -- be every film.
Their anger is understandable. A lot of people have lived this tale
as if it were the novel of their own lives. They have waited a long
time for the movie version. And like the readers of any novel, each
claimant has already "filmed" his own ideal version of the
Philadelphia story. But a movie is not a hologram; its images and
meaning cannot change as they are viewed from various angles and
special interests.
This movie is full of enough facts to make the viewer
suspicious, and enough distortions to be the truth. Maybe it is
every bit as unfair to the FBI, which pursued the case vigorously
and effectively, as it is to Freedom Riders. But whose truth is it
anyway? Every film -- or every biography or news report or memory
-- is distorted, if only by one's perceptions. To create art is to
pour fact into form; and sometimes the form shapes the facts.
William Randolph Hearst never said "Rosebud," and Evita Peron
didn't sing pop, and Richard III was probably a swell guy, no
matter how Shakespeare libeled him. This is what artists do: shape
ideas and grudges and emotions into words and sounds and pictures.
They see "historical accuracy" as a creature of ideological
fashion. Artists take the long view; they figure their visions can
outlast political revisionism.
Mississippi Burning is rooted as firmly in film history as it
is in social history. It takes its cue not so much from the buddy
films as from Warner Bros. melodramas of the '30s, like Black
Legion and They Won't Forget, which seized some social-issue
headlines and fit them into brisk, dynamic fiction. It is movie
journalism: tabloid with a master touch. And the master, the suave
manipulator, is Alan Parker. By avocation he is a caricaturist, and
by vocation too. He chooses gross faces, grand subjects, base
motives, all for immediate impact. The redneck conspirators are
drawn as goofy genetic trash: there's not a three-digit IQ in the
lot, not a chin in a carload. These are not bad men -- they're
baaaad guys. And the blacks are better than good; their faces
reveal them as martyrs, sanctified by centuries of suffering.
Caricature is a fine dramatic tradition, when you have two hours
to tell a story and a million things to say and show.
What Parker hopes to show moviegoers of 1989 is a fable about
1964 -- perhaps the very last historical moment when most American
whites could see Southern blacks purely as righteous rebels for a
just cause. The picture may hold even truer today. Reactionary
whites may not want blacks in their schools, neighborhoods or jobs,
but they can feel empathy for the film's heroic Negroes. For
Parker, that Mississippi summer represented "the beginning of
political consciousness, not just in the South or in America, but
in the whole world." Can Mississippi Burning help raise that
consciousness once again, even as it has already raised old
hackles? Perhaps not. But even that frail hope makes Parker's
determination to go hunting and fishing in Neshoba County worth the
