1996's Wildly Unnecessary Ghosts of Mississippi is a White Savior Story Like Every Other
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Rob Reiner got off to one of the strongest starts as a director in filmmaking history. He roared out of the gate with a string of classics: 1984’s This is Spinal Tap, 1985’s The Sure Thing, 1986’s Stand By Me, 1987’s The Princess Bride, 1989’s When Harry Met Sally…, 1990’s Misery and 1992’s Few Good Men.
Reiner’s first real failure as a director was 1994’s widely reviled North, which is remembered these days mostly for inspiring one of Roger Ebert’s most joyfully vitriolic reviews and for introducing the phrase “I hated hated hated this movie” into the cultural vernacular.
The All in the Family star rebounded briefly with 1995’s well-received The American President before nose-diving with a string of out and out duds that made audiences and critics dread his increasingly unwatchable late-period output.
1996’s well-meaning but utterly pointless Ghosts of Mississippi kicked off a big losing streak that continued with 1999’s The Story of Us, 2003’s Alex & Emma, 2005’s Rumor Has It…, 2010’s Flipped, 2012’s The Magic of Belle Isle, 2014’s And So It Goes, 2015’s Being Charlie, 2016’s LBJ and 2017’s Shock and Awe.
Reiner scored a hit with 2007’s The Bucket List but otherwise it’s been nothing but flops for the last few decades. I don’t even recognize a number of items on Reiner’s Wikipedia page but projects like the 2017 Iraq War docudrama Shock and Awe look eminently skippable.
When I was first bored and underwhelmed by 1996’s The Ghosts of Mississippi at the time of its release its director still had a sterling reputation as a crackerjack comic auteur with a dazzling string of winners to his name.
I’m re-watching it through the prism of a decline so lengthy it entails pretty much the entirety of my career as a writer but my response remains the same.
The only thing that stands out in my memory about the film is James Woods’ Academy-Award nominated performance as deranged hillbilly murderer and proud racist Byron De La Beckwith.
There’s a very good reason for that. Every second he’s onscreen Woods angrily demands the audience’s attention. Everything about him screams, “Looky me! Looky Me! I’m being crazy! Whoopsie Doopsie Doopsie Do, It’s a Racist’s Life for Me!”
Woods had so much fun playing a deranged bigot who loves being racist so much he forever seems to be on the verge of dancing a merry jig to celebrate his hatred of African-Americans that he decided to be a hateful bigot in real life as well.
In Ghosts of Mississippi Woods is a crazed parody of an over the top racist. Today Woods is a crazed parody of an over the top Alt-Right Celebrity has been.
Woods’ big mouth, shitty personality and deplorable politics have landed him in the same tacky Alt-Right acting ghetto as Scott Baio, Kristy Swanson, Kirk Cameron, Kevin Sorbo and various other Conservative bozos despite the Casino character actor being talented and accomplished.
Awards and nominations almost invariably go to people who do the most work as opposed to the best work. That’s Woods here. He lost to Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire. Gooding Jr. briefly won our hearts for a show-boating performance where he literally screamed his catch-phrase while jumping up and down. Gooding Jr.’s Award-winning turn was still restrained and subtle compared to Woods’ lusty, country-fried scenery-chewing.
Ghosts of Mississippi opens with a painfully earnest montage sequence of the history of racism in the United States. Our country’s tragic racial history is represented through a series of iconic images that have lost much of their emotional power through over-use.
Ever the good Liberal, Reiner is letting us know that racism has existed in the United States and is bad. But he has a more timely, relevant message to clumsily impart as well. That is that racism STILL exists and is still EXTREMELY bad.
Thankfully storytellers like Reiner are committed to telling inspirational, heart-warming stories of Caucasian courage about white saviors who helped heal our nation’s racial wounds at a great personal cost to their personal and professional lives.
Is there any better way to pay tribute to slain Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers than through the story of a handsome white lawyer who seeks justice on behalf of his saintly widow?
Alec Baldwin, who will be spending some time in court in the very near future, plays Bobby DeLaughter, the aforementioned handsome white lawyer. He’s a smooth-talking hot shot with a promising career that takes an unexpected turn when Myrlie Evers-Williams (Whoopi Goldberg), Medgar Evers’ widow, asks that the 27 year old case of her husband’s murder be reopened and Byron De La Beckwith retried despite going free after two trials resulted in hung juries.
The attractive district attorney’s friends and families think he’s committing career suicide by taking on racism and murder in a pro-racism, pro-murder state like Mississippi. Bobby’s anti-racist-murder stance spells doom for his marriage to hateful monster Dixie DeLaughter (Virginia Madsen).
Dixie married Bobby because he was handsome and white and Christian and a lawyer with limitless prospects. She is very disturbed and unhappy to discover that her hubby holds strong anti-racist murder views that are incompatible with her worldview and politics.
Dixie leaves him for his anti-racist-murder views. Then he meets a nice doctor lady who is also anti-racist-murder. The two bond over their hatred of cartoonishly evil racist murderers and soon are married.
Bobby is at first reluctant to re-open the case because of the political ramifications and because it is the coldest of cold cases and many of the people involved are dead. But he’s moved by Myrlie’s dedication and persistence and identifies with the slain Civil Rights leader as a fellow father.
Bobby and his allies stumble upon dumb luck when they more or less find the murder weapon just lying around waiting to be retrieved over two and a half decades after the killing.
Byron, meanwhile, stops just short of getting a neck tattoo reading, “Ask me about the time I murdered Medgar Evers” to broadcast his guilt. Woods’ performance reminded me of nothing so much as those Great America commercials where a dancer in an old man mask boogies with an energy and vitality belying his ostensible age.
Here’s the thing about racism, in the South or in the North. It’s complicated. It’s pervasive. It’s insidious. It does not, however, announce itself and then shake your hand the way it does here.
In Ghosts of Mississippi, however, it’s way too easy to separate the good guys from the bad guys because the bad guys announce their evil so loudly and theatrically.
Goldberg delivers a performance that is sometimes powerful in its earnestness but is unmistakably secondary. She may be a hero but her role here is to push a slick white lawyer into heroism and selfless sacrifice.
Ghosts of Mississippi is convinced that it’s doing something noble and right but it’s just another unnecessary white savior story that feels less like an important motion picture than a glorified television movie.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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