Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil

Long, lumpy and sadly charmless, this adaptation of John Berendt's nonfiction portrait of Savannah, GA, refracted through the prism of a scandalous true-crime story, tramples all over the silkily seductive voice that makes the book so compulsively readable and eerily haunting. In order to compress and give linear structure to the dense but loosely connected web of gossip Berendt wove into an unlikely bestseller, screenwriter Lee Hancock invented the character of writer John Kelso (John Cusack), who's sent to Savannah to cover the lavish annual Christmas soiree of wealthy, homosexual antiques dealer Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey). After the party, Williams shoots his l...