Mississippi Burning, nominated for Best Picture of 1988, was filmed in part in Mississippi and fictionalizes a key historical moment in my home state's recent past. Ostensibly, it's about the investigations surrounding the disappearance of three civil rights workers in 1964. However, the filmmakers are not (apparently) attempting to represent what happened with historical accuracy. Instead, this film examines the culture of Mississippi that led to the three men being killed during Freedom Summer.
Can I admit to having never particularly liked this film? Of course, I can admire some aspects of it. The performances by Gene Hackman and Willem Defoe and Frances McDormand and even Brad Dourif are all strong. The visuals are pretty spectacular as well; it is a beautifully shot film, even when it depicts some of the uglier aspects of people's behavior at the time. Yet I still cannot watch the film without feeling as if the filmmakers are trying to ridicule all of the people of Mississippi, trying to depict everyone in the state (with one notable exception) as being racist and/or violent.
All you have to do is watch Defoe's character, a Northern FBI agent, tell Hackman's character about what is wrong with the people of the state to get a sense of what I mean. Hackman's Rupert Anderson is a native of the state, so he understands its people differently than Defoe's Alan Ward. This is a source of constant conflict between the two men, resulting at one point in Ward pointing a gun at Anderson's head in order to get him to submit to his more Northern way of thinking. (Apparently, there are no racists in the North or anywhere else but the South.) I suppose I could applaud the filmmakers for having these two men present a complex and varied understanding of what needs to be done in the state, but frankly, the story is too lopsided to support that sense of complexity.
The exception I mentioned above is, of course, McDormand's housewife. Married to the deputy sheriff who is involved in the murders of the three civil rights workers, her Mrs. Pell gets to deliver a speech about hatred of other races being a learned behavior rather than one that is genetic. She delivers it well, certainly, because McDormand is an enormously talented actor, but it is a rather condescending speech overall. And then she gets beaten up when it becomes clear that she has been helping the investigation. So in the state of Mississippi, any good white person, anyone who reaches out to support or help the black community, is going to be punished?
I particularly disliked the "interviews" with "real" residents that are used to simulate news broadcasts of the time. Almost everyone of the people who appears on camera during these moments says appalling things about blacks. And the director, Alan Parker, was rather infamous for having said that he wanted people who looked like "real Mississippians" for these moments. The fact that they all look like rednecks must have pleased him a great deal. And the words the screenplay puts in their mouths? Repulsive. (He did also say, upon leaving the state after filming, that he felt things hadn't really changed all that much in the intervening 24 years. Apparently, he left thinking that white Mississippi has not progressed much, and that attitude is rather evident in the final film.)
Look, I'm not defending white people or Mississippians. They don't need it and they don't really deserve it. This film covers an awful period in the state's past, and it's certainly accurate in many ways about the racism that was so widespread at the time. Evil things were done at the time, and those who committed these kinds of crimes deserved more severe punishment than they usually received. It just makes me cringe when the only good white people in the film seem to be from the North, except for one woman in an entire town and she has to be brutalized to show just how deep the racism is. Only the outsiders seem to know how to behave properly. Isn't that a bit heavy-handed? I know some will point to the portrayal of Hackman's Anderson as proof that someone from the state has a better understanding of the situation and is, therefore, more effective, but he only seems to be successful when he too uses brutality to achieve his goals. That's hardly a ringing endorsement for his approach.
I could also fault the film for its cowardice in not being more historically accurate. The true story of what happened to Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, the three young men whose bodies were found in an earthen dam, is still worthy of being told. However, this film does an injustice to them and their colleagues in the struggle for civil rights by exaggerating events surrounding the investigation and concentrating much of the time on the struggles between various white characters. As another blogger, also from Mississippi, put it, the real story is both far worse and far better than this movie attempts to show. I've actually never quite understood the admiration that people hold for this film, and after watching it again recently, my previous assessment of it was only reinforced. Someday, perhaps, these three young men will have the movie about them that both they and we deserve.
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