In the Electric Mist

In the Electric Mist is a 2008 police detective show directed by the great Bertrand Tavernier and starring Tommy Lee Jones.  The film was never really released in the United States and seems to have gone direct to DVD.  The movie isn't very good and, in fact, demonstrates the tectonic shift in sensibility that has occurred in the past few years.  Simply put, considerable content in  this well-made, if reactionary-seeming, movie would be impossible today.  Tavernier loses his way, slipping into a sort of anthropology involving the folkways of old Louisiana.  Tommy Lee Jones plays an alcoholic Cajun detective investigating that staple of cable TV and the movies:  a serial killer preying on young prostitutes.  The movie looks authentic, featuring impressive scenes of rural Louisiana and the ruined 9th Ward in New Orleans.  The dialogue is good and the acting fine.  But everything is subtly "off", that is, not quite right.  This is evident in scenes involving Buddy Guy, the famous bluesman, playing a Louisiana rural musician called Pigman Patin.  Tavernier knows more about America than most Americans and, surely, he understands that whatever Buddy Guy's past, the musician has been a staple of the Chicago music scene for about fifty years.  Therefore, it's jarring to see Buddy Guy playing a countryfied blues musician, the sort of performer who will perform in someone's backyard for beer and change. Some scenes are so bad as to be mortifying.  Early in the movie, Dave's longsuffering wife played by Mary Steenburgen, says that he should get in the bedroom because she's "horny" -- this is completely embarrassing and rendered even worse by Tommy Lee Jones, who is no matinee idol particularly at this advanced age, grinning at her like a jack-o-lantern.  Tavernier is adapting a fairly well-known novel In the Electric Mist with the dead Confederate Generals (note that the reference to the "Confederate generals" is suppressed in the title of the movie) and, probably, he is stuck with some of this stuff -- but it's bad voodoo.  

The movie's plot is incomprehensible and I didn't understand the climax which is mismanaged.  In summary, a skeleton of a Black man dead for 43 years turns up in the Atchafalaya swamp.  (A movie crew is shooting a film about the Civil War and the lead actor, a movie star who is a drunk, stumbles onto the cadaver while "taking a leak.")  As it happens, Dave, the cop, witnessed the shooting of the Black man when he was just a lad of 17.  Apparently, he did nothing about the murder, arising from the Black man's affair with a White woman, and has felt guilty about this dereliction for many, many years.  The discovery of the skeleton revives this "old nigger business" and results in a series of killings intended to conceal the identity of the murderer who is, now, an old and prosperous business man.  (Lots and lots of people get murdered in this movie, probably about ten victims.)  As Dave investigates the murder that he actually witnessed in 1965, someone is hacking to death young prostitutes -- it's seems odd that a rural county in Louisiana has a prostitution problem, but, I guess, you need to suspend disbelief on this point.  The two investigations, as is the genre convention, converge -- as it turns out one of the murderers of the Black man is also a sex criminal torturing to death whores that he picks up.  This is convenient if unconvincing and I must admit that I didn't understand the film's ending, felt that the sex-murder plot was unresolved, and, only, later figured-out that the two strands of the story were supposed to resolve into a single thread at the end of the picture.  There's a subplot involving a corrupt mafia-style trucking magnate -- that role played by John Goodman who has done this sort of thing better and in better movies; he basically phones in his performance although he has mastered a particularly ripe, fruity, and sinister Louisiana dialect.  

The problem with the film is that the scenarist thinks that we will excuse bad conduct by the hero if he shows virtue in other aspects of his behavior.  This is a primitive sort of moral calculus and incoherent.  We are supposed to forgive Dave for his brutal and illegal behavior because his heart is in the right place and he acts kindly with respect to some colored characters.  Dave is equipped with a Black sidekick at his bait shop (he moonlights renting boats and selling live bait).  The role of this character is purely ceremonial -- he's supposed to show that Dave isn't racist.  Dave is also given a FBI partner, a Latino woman -- she's also completely ceremonial and affords a basis for Dave to show that he is liberal and color-blind.  But the plot is a variant on the "rampaging" violent cop routine and Dave is as vicious as Dirty Harry.  Twice we see him planting firearms on the corpses of people accidentally gunned-down and we are supposed to applaud his ingenuity.  In one scene, Dave beats a Back pimp, named Adonis Brown (that's really his name in the film) to a bloody pulp because he was hitting on a couple of White girls in a New Orleans bus stop.  The scene doesn't have any narrative purpose as far as I can tell and it's just gratuitous Dirty-Harry style vigilante violence.  Can Tavernier possibly be so utterly tone-deaf about American race relations?  Furthermore, the film is totally without irony -- something that I would normally applaud but here consider problematic.  Finally, there's a weird sequence involving Confederate soldiers and an old Texas general who are camping in the bayou -- at first, this is posited as delirium tremens on the part of the movie star in the Civil War film being shot in the area, the Iberia Parish.  Later, however, Dave starts interacting with the Confederate general and discussing the burden of history, rectitude, and other Faulknerian topics with him.  We live in an era in which statues of Confederate generals are being torn down.  Therefore, it seems odd that we are supposed to regard as wise the aphorisms spoken by a military man committed to defending slavery.  I recognize that the film was made more than ten years before this present moment, but didn't anyone think there was something problematic about a movie involving race relations establishing as its moral center a Texas Confederate Civil War general?  (And these scenes with Dave conversing with the General are poorly imagined and indifferently staged.)  Scorsese trafficked in some pretty nasty racial material in Taxi Driver but, at least, he had the wit to make the vicious pimp a White man (Harvey Keitel) -- and how many years ago was that?  After the trial of Derek Chauvin, it's hard to condone a film that celebrates a lawless, brutal cop.  Tavernier was the smartest man making movies while he was alive and active -- but he made a serious misstep with this picture.