In The Electric Mist - Mystery Meat Gumbo

Nov

27

In The Electric Mist - Mystery Meat Gumbo

≡ Category: Drama, Movie Reviews, Not Worth Your Time, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama
Director: Bertrand Tavernier
Year: 2009

Rating:

NOT WORTH YOUR TIME

It’s easy to see why In The Electric Mist went straight to video. It’s a murder mystery with next to no action, unless you count Tommy Lee Jones beating the crap out of people to get information. There’s a ton of voiceover narration by the Tommy Lee Jones character, using very flowery language that might be fine in a novel, but goes over like a lead balloon in a movie. The Jones character hallucinates a Civil War general talking to him, a fantasy element that also tends to work better in novels. For the first hour or so, stuff happens which seems to be entirely disconnected, and you know what? The pieces never really do come together in a satisfying way. Even the Louisiana bayou feel of the production seems a tad off, not a huge surprise considering that James Lee Burke’s novel was adapted by a couple of Eastern Europeans and directed by a Frenchman.

It seems that somebody’s been murdering prostitutes, eviscerating them and leaving them lying around hither and yon. In a parallel development that never really syncs up with present time events, cop Dave Robicheaux (Tommy Lee Jones) saw a black man murdered in a swamp forty years previously. Robicheaux is convinced that the prostitute murders are connected to Julie ‘Baby Feet’ Balboni (John Goodman). Why? A cop’s hunch, I guess, because Balboni is an organized crime honcho who just got out of jail. There sure isn’t any evidence.

Balboni is bankrolling a movie in the area, which stars Elrod Sykes (Peter Sarsgaard) and Kelly Drummond (Kelly Macdonald). What do these two have to do with the mystery? I’m not saying, but by the time the end credits roll, you might feel like your chain is being jerked.

In The Electric Mist has an amazing cast. Besides the actors I’ve already mentioned, Mary Steenburgen, Ned Beatty, James Gammon, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and John Sayles also show up. It’s always nice to see them, but I have to wonder why they got on board. I don’t see how it could be the script by Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, which is scattershot, idiomatically incompetent, and unwieldy. Probably it was the reputation of Bertrand Tavernier, who has directed many fine movies in his native France. This was his first attempt at an American genre picture, and it should probably be his last.

Tavernier does manage a certain amount of subliminal tension, but I think that’s mostly because next to nothing happens throughout the movie, and audiences conditioned to action-packed American movies expect that Tavernier is lulling them to sleep so he can sucker punch them at some point, but that moment never comes. Maybe that’s the surprise.

Curiously, the scenes in which Tommy Lee Jones kicks the tar out of assorted lowlifes have a certain brutal energy to them, so it’s not that Tavernier doesn’t have the ability to direct action. I just don’t think he has the interest.

You’ve got to ask yourself, what did director Tavernier think he was trying to accomplish? I have no idea. In The Electric Mist isn’t exactly unpleasant to sit through, but it feels pretty pointless.