Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN IN THE LINE OF FIRE 'MISSISSIPPI' & TALK RADIO' Mississippi Burning starts With a spooky, terrifying sequence: three young civil rights workers disappear one summer night in 1964. The...
...The set-an old backwater town, half-dust and half-swamp, with its shan-tytown black ghettos under constant threat-conjures up an American version of hell...
...but as Parker implies, not always remembered clearly either...
...But the film is too restrained on one level, too overstated on another...
...Dafoe plays a clean-cut, methodical, Kennedyesque special agent-about as close as any FBI man could get to the New Frontier...
...Parker moves his film into the present with the last image, a shot of Chaney's vandalized gravestone with only its bottom half ("...1964 Not Forgotten") readable...
...But there is no motion inside Bogosian...
...Oliver Stone directed Talk Radio, and (as in his Platoon and Wall Street) co-wrote the screenplay...
...In short, the film blends the stuff of social protest and the Hollywood "buddy film" now standard fare for police-action dramas...
...Moreover, Parker underemphasizes the point that the villains could never be convicted in state courts, and got abbreviated sentences in the federal...
...Not forgotten," true...
...The film is almost entirely set inside a studio: Stone uses a moving camera to compensate for the static feel, and sends Bogosian stalking around the studio talking through his headset...
...And they are based on fact: thirty-one black churches were firebombed in '64 alone...
...Besides overstatement and the burdens of the buddy genre...
...a meditation on the value of restraint...
...The film never outgrows its roots as a one-man play...
...the film has other problems: no black figure becomes recognizable or important...
...If anyone is innocent of radio talk shows, just multiply the vulgarity, rudeness, and vicarious wickedness of the new "tabloid television" tenfold...
...Such talk shows are festivals of exchanged cruelties, with host and call-in guests exchanging racial and sexual insults, discussing without an iota of taste every kind of social and psychological problem...
...In Talk Radio he almost turns out a real novelty...
...Frances McDormand, as the sheriffs wife, is especally good, but would that her most important line-the breakthrough in the case-had been cut in half...
...The FBI team pairs Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman...
...At one point, defending the angry, compulsive way he provokes the racists and other kooks who call him up, Bogosian says, "my greatest fear is being boring...
...It's not pretty, but it is potent...
...No region can be smug about racism, but Mississippi in 1964 was especially bad...
...Stone's strength is satire...
...The depictions of Klan violence will upset many...
...Plot in Talk Radio involves repetitive squabbles between Bogosian and his boss about broadcast standards, and with his wife and girlfriend about his emotional compulsions...
...Again, Stone aims at ugly social realism, no holds barred, for purposes of moral satire...
...Supporting actors are strong, with the roles of local law officers and Klan bullies well-played...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...TOM O'BRIENise...
...Sometimes too much of the film depicts the odd-couple nature of Dafoe and Hackman: they fight about police methods, then have to make up in order to find common ground...
...The scenes from that time, included here, show fire bombings, barn burnings, lynchings, stories or threats of castration...
...Dafoe is good at playing idealists (Sergeant Elias in Platoon, Jesus in The Last Temptation...
...Mississippi Burning is history with a contemporary bite...
...The terse beginning and tight editing throughout also keep the tone refreshingly somber...
...Alas, the film is...
...drama is, too...
...others may be too young...
...Motion is not only in short supply...
...Talk Radio portrays a hot topic to cold, effect...
...Director Alan Parker creates suspense for both groups by focusing not on the young civil rights workers, but on a fictional FBI team trying to solve their disappearance...
...Much of the film's power lies in catching their fanaticism, especially that of a deputy sheriff (Brad Dourif...
...A satire- even a hard-edged one on the addictive effects of such shows-would be welcome...
...His bright eyes and taut face always suggest someone about to burst-an impression strengthened here by his tight, narrow, slightly nerdy sixties' suit...
...He has, he explains, "full powers" to get to the bottom of the case, although the exact nature of his support from Washington is never made clear...
...The three-Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman-were seen in Mississippi as !'outside agitators looking for trouble...
...Little develops-except a violent act in the last moment, which comes as no surprise...
...Starring Eric Bogosian, it fuses his offbeat play of the same title with the story of Alan Berg, the Denver talk-show host killed by neo-Nazis...
...Despite moments of chilling power in calls from crazed callers, it leaves no resonance...
...it's not only a one-man, but a one-note show, and the note is depressing...
...The title,"Mississippi Burning," was initially the name of the FBI file on those events...
...Still, his power to recreate atmosphere and tension is remarkable...
...His climactic, bulging-eyes scene on the state of the cosmos is particularly lifeless...
...Some in the audience today, of course, will know the actual story of the missing civil rights workers...
...Bogosian plays a fictional Dallas talk-show host, Barry Champlain...
...Despite some flaws, the film has the strength of harsh honesty about this racist hatred...
...Luckily, the driven Dafoe and Hackman, an actor's actor, are there to redeem the formulas...
...Hackman has the more winning part as a former southern sheriff, a drawling "good ole boy," who is ambivalent about racism, but knows a thing or two about how to deal with the Klan...
...Both parts work well, despite overstatement in the fictional portions...
...The screenplay by Chris Gerolmo is part fact and fiction, "who-dun-it" and "how-will-they-solve-it...
Vol. 116 • January 1989 • No. 1
