The characters in the book live with such vivid energy that it's a shame we see them only in their relations with Kelso, the quiet outsider (there's hardly a scene in the movie of the locals talking to one another without the Yankee witness). Jack Thompson gives a solid performance as Sonny Seiler, the defense attorney, but he's from John Grisham territory, not Savannah. His death inspired an unprecedented four trials in real life, which the movie can be excused for reducing to one-but as the conventions of courtroom melodrama take over, what makes Savannah unique gradually fades out of the picture. But the screenplay whacks the anecdotal material into shape to fit the crime-and-courtroom genre.Ī doped-up young bisexual hothead ( Jude Law) is introduced in two overplayed scenes, and then found dead on the floor of antiques dealer Jim Williams' office. Or if Kelso had been a weird character, too, that might have helped he's written and played as a flat, bland witness, whose tentative love affair with a local temptress ( Alison Eastwood) is so abashed we almost wonder if he's ever dated before.īerendt's nonfiction book (the credits inexplicably call it a novel) circulates with amusement and incredulity among unforgettable characters. There is nothing wrong with the performance by John Cusack except that it is unnecessary if John Lee Hancock's screenplay had abandoned the Kelso character and just jumped into the midst of Savannah's menagerie with both feet, the movie might have had more energy and color.

He is not, however, really a major player in the book, and the movie makes a mistake by assigning its central role to a New York writer, now named John Kelso, through whose hands all of the action must pass. The plot grows labyrinthine after the antiques dealer is charged with the murder of a young hustler.īerendt introduces these people and tells their stories in a bemused, gossipy fashion he's a natural storyteller who knows he has great stories to tell, and relishes the telling.

Gradually he meets the local fauna, including a gay antiques dealer, a piano bar owner of no fixed abode, a drag queen, a voodoo priestess, a man who keeps flies on leashes, a man who walks an invisible dog and the members of the Married Women's Card Club. The book tells the story of a New York author who visits Savannah, Ga., is bewitched, and takes an apartment there.

John berendt author