MISSISSIPPI BURNING
A film review by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1989 Jeff Meyer
It was only a matter of time before the Civil Rights movement became a background for a Hollywood production. Periods of history where great evils are most apparent have always been tableaus for drama, and the ignorances and atrocities and courage which dotted the South during this period are fertile ground for this.
MISSISSIPPI BURNING not only uses Mississippi in the early 1960s as it's setting, but it uses the events surrounding the murder of three civil rights activists as the basis of the story. Unfortunately, what director Alan Parker leaves behind are the facts of the case. He shows the FBI as being the force behind bringing the murderers of the three young men, spearheaded by a younger Justice Dept. administrator (Willem Dafoe) and an older, Southern-raised agent (Gene Hackman). He tosses in a romantic interest for Hackman, whose assault rankles him to try to find the murderers even if he has to break the law to do it. And Parker basically sets the audience up to cheer on the FBI as they sink down to their opposition's level. It's history throttled, minced and served up in ROCKY IV style, pandering to the Friday night crowds.
In truth, the FBI (dominated by J. Edgar Hoover, who felt that much of the civil rights movement were sponsored by Communists) put nowhere near the force into the field to investigate the murders (the killings did take on national attention, as two of the activists were white). The murderers were finally convicted by a bribe to one of their members, not investigations done by the FBI. Apparently, history didn't give Parker the happy ending he was looking for, so he decided to change it, along with many of the events that surrounded the case, to "make a better movie." Throughout this film, I kept wondering why Parker hadn't made his film a fictionalized story set during this period, but without alleged roots in the events of this case. My only assumption is that to Alan Parker, an Alan Parker film is more important than a misrepresentation of one of the more important events of the 1960s.
And this *is* an Alan Parker film. Hollywood cliches are stuck in left and right, particularly the old hand/young reformer saw represented by Hackman and DaFoe. Almost everyone is a stereotype, which leads one to wonder whether the stupidity and bullying and violent ignorance displayed by the Klan and their ilk are due to bad breeding or bad writing. If you've seen TV footage of this period, you'll know it's not bad writing, but the level of the rest of the film brings that into doubt -- everything is so over-played that the brutality of these people fades in comparison. Even the carnage is stamped with Parker's particular visual amplification; when the Klan bomb a Negro household with a can of gasoline, not only does the house explode, but the fence and the mailbox outside the house explode. I think we get the picture, Alan.
There are a few good points in the film. Both Hackman and Dafoe valiantly attempt to make their characters break out of their two-dimensional roles, and Hackman succeeds at points due to sheer acting skill and stage presence. But all in all, it looks tailor-made to reap Oscar awards (as it already has Oscar nominations); Hollywood likes nothing better than to applaud a film that pats itself on the back. The South advanced away from prejudice mostly through the courage of black Southerners who risked their lives and their families well-being to take a stand, with little support from government agencies until the very end. Watching DaFoe and Hackman ride off into the sunset, with black and white children singing together, is sugar-coating what happened in the worst way; it's almost as if Parker had never left advertising for feature films. Like, shouldn't they be holding cans of Diet Coke?
If you'd like to see something that's twice as moving as this film and one hell of a lot more accurate, I recommend renting EYES ON THE PRIZE, a six-hour video documentary of the Civil Rights movement which shown on PBS last year, and is available at local libraries and some video stores. I guarantee you that you won't be missing anything of interest that MISSISSIPPI BURNING has to offer by watching this instead. Unless you really enjoy exploding mailboxes.
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
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