John Grisham’s The Rainmaker
Rating ** Worth seeing Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Written by Coppola and Michael Herr With Matt Damon, Claire Danes, Jon Voight, Mary Kay Place, Mickey Rourke, Danny DeVito, Danny Glover, and Virginia Madsen.
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It’s harder to come up with a model for the Eastwood film, but if I had to settle on a single one, I’d need to go back a lot farther than the 50s–all the way back to the 20s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Admittedly, Midnight lacks anything resembling the tragic love story that stands at the quiet center of Gatsby; it mostly involves the closeted and uncloseted gay subculture of Savannah, which has no precise counterpart in Fitzgerald’s novel (apart from the rather loose parallel of a “criminal subculture”). But both works are atmospheric mood pieces about a nouveau riche millionaire who throws famously lavish, well-attended parties and is eventually brought down by a violent crime related to the connections he maintains with the working class, “rough trade” in particular. (Although “rough trade” generally refers only to the gay milieu, one could argue that George and Myrtle Wilson in Gatsby are the heterosexual equivalents.) Both stories are recounted by a relatively detached and anonymous outsider, a neighbor and guarded friend of the mysterious millionaire who attends some of his parties and also becomes acquainted with people from other classes in the millionaire’s orbit. Beyond these parallels, the connections are more tenuous, although one might postulate a structural similarity between the magical-realism functions of voodoo in Midnight and the equally bracketed functions of high modernism in Gatsby–most of them tied to T.S. Eliot in references such as the “valley of ashes” and the giant “eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg” (a faded optometrist’s sign) brooding over Fitzgerald’s symbolic terrain. And both works must change gears stylistically for the romantic-realist narrative to become more metaphysical, appealing to a higher order.
Both movies, I hasten to add, fall way short of their models, but at their best they evoke a little of their precursors’ suggestive magic. But what distinguishes Midnight most clearly from The Rainmaker is its more sophisticated and complex moral framework. The villains and the good guys in Coppola’s film are easily spotted and never deviate from their assigned moral roles–on one side, venal insurance scam artists, their corrupt lawyers, and a psychotic wife beater, and on the other, their abject victims and idealistic opponents. But no such fixed positions can be parceled out to the characters in the Eastwood movie, where moral relativity and moral ambiguity reign. From a world-weary 90s vantage point but described in terms of the 50s, the difference is simply that between square and hip.
Berendt–a journalist who was a casual friend of Williams–has a somewhat ambiguous relation to the hero partially cloaked by the “nonfiction novel” label. (One friend describes their conversations as the moves of two canny poker players.) There’s no such ambiguity in the movie, which substitutes for Berendt a clearly fictional, unambiguously heterosexual journalist (John Cusack) who even has a romance with a local singer (Alison Eastwood). As in Eastwood’s White Hunter, Black Heart, the character replacing the book’s narrator is relatively faceless; like the shadowy reporter Thompson in Citizen Cane, he functions more as the viewer’s conduit into the world of the other characters than as a personality in his own right.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): The Rainmaker/ Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil film stills.
