Dave Robicheaux is a lawman in the town of New Iberia, Louisiana. In the Electric Mist finds him investigating multiple homicides, most committed within weeks of the discovery of the victim’s remains, but one of them, the one no one cares about, goes back over 40 years. If a few freshly mutilated prostitutes prompt a certain apathy among the locals, a decades-old case of “nigger troubles” barely elicits a shrug. But every one of these deaths means something to Dave, and something tells him that the crimes of New Iberia’s past may not be so disparate from its present. The bayou functions here a forensic palimpsest, where clues that pertain to one death can be read amidst the traces of another. Every death in this film is connected to every other, and there is the sense that these surroundings, fecund both in vegetation and irrepressible memories, conspire to aid Dave in his pursuit of justice.
I imagine the role of landscape, place and history in this story was one of the things that most attracted French director Bertrand Tavernier, for whom this is the first American film since 1986’s ’Round Midnight. Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, who also adapted Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s novel The Pledge for Sean Penn’s underrated 2001 film, wrote this adaptation of In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, the 1993 novel by James Lee Burke, who has a home in New Iberia and, like most good mystery writers, has made the evocation of place a pivotal element in his fiction. Tavernier’s film takes place after Hurricane Katrina, so Burke’s emphasis on the elements is only heightened by the lingering wreckage glimpsed during Dave’s commutes between New Iberia and New Orleans.
Dave is played by Tommy Lee Jones, who brings his inimitable dour authority to this tough-ass recovering alcoholic with well-oiled investigative instincts and few reservations when it comes to incorporating a little tire-slashing, police brutality or planting of evidence into his practice. The supporting roles have been taken up by a cast of equally impressive pedigree, with Mary Steenburgen as Dave’s wife; John Goodman as the wonderfully monikered “Baby Feet,” a swampland gangster branching out into movie producing; Peter Sarsgaard as a movie star on the verge of a meltdown and Kelly MacDonald as his very patient girlfriend; Ned Beatty in his stock role of the embodiment of fat, aged and affluent corruption; real-life bluesman Buddy Guy as a local sage and kick-ass guitar player and real-life filmmaker John Sayles as the bitter director of a Civil War drama; and The Band’s Levon Helm as General John Bell Hood of the Texas Cavalry. If that last character’s title reads as incongruous to the setting of this contemporary thriller, that’s because Dave, after having unwittingly drank some Dr. Pepper spiked with acid, starts to receive council from phantom Civil War vets. The dead, he explains, “can hover on the edge of our vision with the density and luminosity of mist, and their claim on the earth can be legitimate and tenacious as our own.”
Dave doesn’t talk like that in casual conversation. His musings on the spiritual realm are reserved for In the Electric Mist’s rather literary-sounding voice-over, which, while echoing Jones’ far more essential flights of disembodied philosophizing in No Country For Old Men, is one of the film’s weak points. To get an idea of just how superfluous this voice-over is you only need to watch the very first scene, where Dave sits at a bar, stares down into a glass of whiskey, then gets up and walks away. His voice-over tells us that he’s an alcoholic and is often tempted to drink, but never does—all of which is made obvious by the very well-framed and performed scene. But I suspect the voice-over may have been tacked on as someone’s idea of a rescue effort, though in the end nothing rescued this film from obscurity. In the Electric Mist screened in a slightly longer version this past February in Berlin before going directly to video. I’d like to say it’s shocking that this pretty sharp little bayou thriller brimming with such a wealth of name talent went straight to video, but these days, when a lion’s share of many critics’ yearly top ten lists feature movies most people never even get to see, nothing’s all that shocking anymore.
Tavernier is no stranger to the American South, or even to American crime fiction. Solid and recommendable as In the Electric Mist is, it’s a far cry from Coup de torchon, Tavernier’s absolutely brilliant 1981 adaptation of Jim Thompson’s deliciously sordid 1964 novel Pop. 1280, which follows the infernal trajectory of a seemingly bovine but secretly sociopathic small town sheriff. Tavernier’s blackly comic and inspired re-envisioning shifts the action from the West Texas to 1930s French West Africa and shines a dazzlingly fresh light on the story’s colonialist undercurrents. It also features masterful performances from Isabelle Huppert and the late, great Philippe Noiret. Criterion put it out on DVD some years back and it is very much worth seeking out.
No comments:
Post a Comment