I'll make this summary as succinct as I can.
Dennis Hopper is Paris Trout, a big frog in a small 1950s Georgia pond, who runs a store and lends money. He's aided by Barbara Hershey, his wife in a loveless marriage. Hopper gets into a pointless argument with an African-American debtor, takes his assistant to the man's shabby house to collect, and winds up shooting a black woman and her twelve-year-old daughter. The daughter dies.
Ed Harris enters the picture as Hopper's defense counsel. Harris and Hershey fall for each other. Hopper is convicted of manslaughter and given a light sentence by an all-white jury, but immediately bribes his way out of the slams. Deserted by his wife, faced with the impending death of his mother, Hopper goes berserk and shoots several people, leaving himself for last.
Well. This would have been SO easy to turn into another trite story of noble blacks abused and railroaded by nasty whites, with Ed Harris the recherché hero who demands that the justice system adhere to the law.
But the intelligent screenplay by Peter Dexter doesn't make it that commercial -- or that morally easy. This is a believable story of confused and complex people, not a Manichaean tale of good and evil.
Without in any way excusing Hopper's character for the deliberate shooting, the screenplay gives him a personality that's both familiar and exotic as he edges from penny-pinching self-involved and gloomy into a paranoid psychotic.
The story isn't set in the segregated South of the 50s just to give it modernistic oomph either. The winds of post-war change were stirring the leaves of the magnolia and the kudzu. Hopper is a veteran of World War I who cannot accept the prodromal symptoms of this change. In his world, everyone carries a gun, cares for his neighbor, keeps the blacks in their place, and understands the norms -- not necessarily the laws. The story almost HAS to take place in the South because in no other part of the country are Americans so hard-headed about history and the received traditions.
Not that the South is denigrated. Far from it. Its corruption and racism are accepted matter-of-factly -- as understood -- but its citizens are happy enough to take part in such rites of intensification as Confederate Day parades. That includes the perceptive Ed Harris, who wears a grey Confederate kepi during the celebrations. Those traditions are held in honor by the script, although they are justly pruned of their least constructive features. At the end, when three bodies are being buried, Hershey's voice over tells us that that's the problem -- it's easier to bury things than forget them, and I assume that's Dexter's way of trying to tell us that the core values of the South -- self-reliance and all that -- will survive the current tide of social change. The script almost prefigures the Civil Rights backlash that would follow the 1960s when, on the witness stand, Hopper explains to the jury in simple words that "I figured a white man had as much right to make a living as a colored." (Affirmative action, anyone?)
The dialog is full of felicities. Dexter has captured the tendency of some of the more eloquent Southerners to pump up their remarks with occasional elegance, sometimes for comic effect. Harris is likely to use words like "contention" and "transcends" in the court room, while the populace at large is likely to have trouble reading its own written statement, as Hopper is on the stand. (Sophisticated Yankee-types sometimes use "ain't" for the same purposes.) At the same time, everyone speaks, moves, and thinks slowly, as if exhausted by the heat.
The performances are uniformly good. Aside from the principles, Wallace Wilkinson is fine as the ICU doctor who placidly describes how and why the little girl is dying of her wounds. Whoever plays the thin, languid, intense DA is equally outstanding.
The direction, in itself, is nothing special except to the extent that it guided the performances. At least it isn't MTV, which is a refreshing change. Imagine a director willing to give the audience time to absorb a scene and unwilling to treat us as easily bored teens who are eager to switch channels. The photography is too dark. The location shooting captures the ethos of the place but there's little in the way of exteriors.
Nice job though.
Dennis Hopper is Paris Trout, a big frog in a small 1950s Georgia pond, who runs a store and lends money. He's aided by Barbara Hershey, his wife in a loveless marriage. Hopper gets into a pointless argument with an African-American debtor, takes his assistant to the man's shabby house to collect, and winds up shooting a black woman and her twelve-year-old daughter. The daughter dies.
Ed Harris enters the picture as Hopper's defense counsel. Harris and Hershey fall for each other. Hopper is convicted of manslaughter and given a light sentence by an all-white jury, but immediately bribes his way out of the slams. Deserted by his wife, faced with the impending death of his mother, Hopper goes berserk and shoots several people, leaving himself for last.
Well. This would have been SO easy to turn into another trite story of noble blacks abused and railroaded by nasty whites, with Ed Harris the recherché hero who demands that the justice system adhere to the law.
But the intelligent screenplay by Peter Dexter doesn't make it that commercial -- or that morally easy. This is a believable story of confused and complex people, not a Manichaean tale of good and evil.
Without in any way excusing Hopper's character for the deliberate shooting, the screenplay gives him a personality that's both familiar and exotic as he edges from penny-pinching self-involved and gloomy into a paranoid psychotic.
The story isn't set in the segregated South of the 50s just to give it modernistic oomph either. The winds of post-war change were stirring the leaves of the magnolia and the kudzu. Hopper is a veteran of World War I who cannot accept the prodromal symptoms of this change. In his world, everyone carries a gun, cares for his neighbor, keeps the blacks in their place, and understands the norms -- not necessarily the laws. The story almost HAS to take place in the South because in no other part of the country are Americans so hard-headed about history and the received traditions.
Not that the South is denigrated. Far from it. Its corruption and racism are accepted matter-of-factly -- as understood -- but its citizens are happy enough to take part in such rites of intensification as Confederate Day parades. That includes the perceptive Ed Harris, who wears a grey Confederate kepi during the celebrations. Those traditions are held in honor by the script, although they are justly pruned of their least constructive features. At the end, when three bodies are being buried, Hershey's voice over tells us that that's the problem -- it's easier to bury things than forget them, and I assume that's Dexter's way of trying to tell us that the core values of the South -- self-reliance and all that -- will survive the current tide of social change. The script almost prefigures the Civil Rights backlash that would follow the 1960s when, on the witness stand, Hopper explains to the jury in simple words that "I figured a white man had as much right to make a living as a colored." (Affirmative action, anyone?)
The dialog is full of felicities. Dexter has captured the tendency of some of the more eloquent Southerners to pump up their remarks with occasional elegance, sometimes for comic effect. Harris is likely to use words like "contention" and "transcends" in the court room, while the populace at large is likely to have trouble reading its own written statement, as Hopper is on the stand. (Sophisticated Yankee-types sometimes use "ain't" for the same purposes.) At the same time, everyone speaks, moves, and thinks slowly, as if exhausted by the heat.
The performances are uniformly good. Aside from the principles, Wallace Wilkinson is fine as the ICU doctor who placidly describes how and why the little girl is dying of her wounds. Whoever plays the thin, languid, intense DA is equally outstanding.
The direction, in itself, is nothing special except to the extent that it guided the performances. At least it isn't MTV, which is a refreshing change. Imagine a director willing to give the audience time to absorb a scene and unwilling to treat us as easily bored teens who are eager to switch channels. The photography is too dark. The location shooting captures the ethos of the place but there's little in the way of exteriors.
Nice job though.