GHOSTS OF MISSISSIPPI

Ghosts of Mississippi

Ghosts of Mississippi

Introduction

Ghosts of Mississippi. Dir. by Rob Reiner. Castle Rock Entertainment and Columbia Pictures, 1997. 123 mins.

Always more concerned with entertainment and profits than with anything approximating historical accuracy, Hollywood continues to blurand often obliterate - the wavering line between history and fantasy. The end of 1996 saw a raft of fact-based films, based more or less on real events: Michael Collins, The Crucible, The English Patient, Evita, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Shine, and Ghosts of Mississippi. Each raised anew perennial questions of how Hollywood performs its role as cinematic historian: presenting information about real people and actual events from the past, explaining and interpreting critical episodes and developments, and, supposedly, depicting reality (Mitchell, 1996).

We judge gingerly. Surely few among us are naive enough to apply to film the standards by which we would evaluate a historical monograph. We make allowances for the demands of an exciting narrative (that is, for the box office), often overlooking the compression of time or the collapsing of a larger number of historical personages into one or a few and frequently ignoring the simplification of motivation and the emphasis on individual agency rather than on socioeconomic change. Still, we demand integrity, a faithfulness to, at least, the spirit of the historical evidence as opposed, for example, to the characterization of power-hungry Eva Duarte Peron as little more than a youthful Edith Piaf, to the delineation of Larry Flynt as a crusader for free speech and the United States Constitution, or to the very essence of Ghosts of Mississippi-despite its opening announcement: "This story is true."

Discussion and Analyses

We were once told the film would deal with Medgar Evers's life and death, as well as with his widow's three-decade effort to press for a new trial; those were the stories at the heart of the 1995 book the movie was supposedly based on, Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron de la Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South by Maryanne Vollers. Ghosts of Mississippi is instead yet another Hollywood saga of a southern white male coming to grips with his own, and his society's, racism. Like Mississippi Burning (1989; JAH review December 1991), it uses the struggle for black equality solely to launch its white crusader's quest, again transforming a black-centered historical event into the tale of a white man who dominates the film from start to finish. And like A Time to Kill(1996), which it closely resembles, Ghosts of Mississippi employs all the stock devices of a legal melodrama: elusive evidence and the sudden appearance of missing documents, bomb threats, alienated family members, implacable enemies, and, especially, courtroom grandstanding (Staples, 1989).

When we first meet the Jackson district attorney Bobby DeLaughter (Alec Baldwin), he is comfortably married to a belle named Dixie, "the daughter of Mississippi's most racist judge," and does not think twice about singing "Dixie" to his daughter as a lullaby. But then he is assigned to look into the possibility of ...