Savannah is a city built on top of its dead. It’s spooky, humid, and deeply obsessed with its own reputation. When Clint Eastwood rolled into town to film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 1997, he wasn’t just making a movie; he was trying to capture a vibe that was already a national obsession thanks to John Berendt’s non-fiction juggernaut. People expected a masterpiece. What they got was... complicated.
It’s been decades. Yet, if you walk into a bar on Jones Street today and bring up the film, you’ll still get an earful about what Clint got right and where he absolutely whiffed.
The movie focuses on the real-life killing of Danny Hansford by Jim Williams, a wealthy antiques dealer. It’s a Southern Gothic legal drama, but it's mostly a character study of a town that treats eccentricity like a competitive sport. Kevin Spacey played Williams with a cold, calculated stillness that felt almost too precise. Then you had John Cusack playing John Kelso—a character who didn't actually exist in real life. He was a surrogate for Berendt, the author, but his presence changed the chemistry of the story. It turned a sprawling, journalistic observation of a city into a more traditional "outsider looks in" narrative.
Some folks hate that change. Honestly, I get it.
The Real Ghost of Mercer House
The heart of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 1997 is the Mercer House. You can't talk about the film without talking about that massive, brick Italianate mansion on Monterey Square. Jim Williams spent years restoring it. He was a man of immense taste and even greater ego. When he shot Danny Hansford there in 1981, he claimed self-defense. The legal saga that followed lasted eight years and four trials.
Think about that. Four trials for one man.
Eastwood’s film compresses this timeline significantly. It has to. You can’t put eight years of legal maneuvering into a two-hour runtime without boring the audience to tears. But in that compression, some of the grit was lost. The real Jim Williams wasn't just a refined gentleman; he was a polarizing figure who many in Savannah's high society tolerated only because of his money and his parties. Spacey’s performance captures the arrogance, but maybe misses the underlying desperation of a man trying to maintain a facade while his world collapses.
Then there’s the Lady Chablis.
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She played herself. Let that sink in for a second. In an era where Hollywood rarely gave space to trans performers, Chablis was the undisputed star of the movie. She brought an authenticity that no scripted lines could match. Her presence is the reason the film still feels alive. When she’s on screen, the movie stops being a "Clint Eastwood Film" and starts being a document of Savannah’s soul. She was loud, she was proud, and she was "two-tears-in-a-bucket, motherf*** it."
Why the Atmosphere Matters More Than the Plot
Most people watch Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 1997 for the scenery. They want the Spanish moss. They want the squares. They want the "voodoo" in Bonaventure Cemetery.
Minerva, the voodoo priestess played by Irma P. Hall, represents the spiritual underbelly of the story. In reality, Williams actually consulted with a woman named Valerie Bolden. The scenes in the cemetery—the "midnight" hour for good and the "half-hour after" for evil—gave the movie its title and its mysticism. It’s easy to dismiss this as Hollywood fluff, but in the South, these traditions aren't just folklore. They’re lived experiences for many.
Eastwood used a very muted, golden-hour palette for the cinematography. It looks like a postcard that’s been sitting in the sun for thirty years. It’s beautiful, but it's also stagnant.
That stagnation is the point.
Savannah is a city that, for a long time, prided itself on not changing. The film captures that perfectly. The way people dress, the way they talk around a subject rather than about it, the obsession with lineage—it’s all there. But the movie struggled at the box office. It only made about $25 million against a $30 million budget. Why? Probably because it’s a slow burn. It’s a "hangout movie" disguised as a murder mystery. If you go in expecting A Few Good Men, you’re going to be disappointed. If you go in expecting to feel the humidity through the screen, you’ll love it.
The Problem With John Kelso
Let's be real: John Cusack is a great actor, but the character of Kelso is the weakest link. In the book, the narrator is a passive observer. He’s the lens through which we see the circus. In the movie, they tried to give him a romance subplot with Mandy Nichols (played by Alison Eastwood). It felt forced. It felt like the studio said, "We need a love interest," even though the real story had zero room for one.
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The romance takes away from the tension of the trials. It softens the edges of a story that should be sharper.
However, the supporting cast saves it. Jude Law as Billy Hanson (the film's version of Danny Hansford) is electric. He’s a ticking time bomb of blonde hair and rage. You can see why Jim Williams was fascinated by him, and you can see why he was terrified of him. The chemistry between Spacey and Law is where the real "garden of good and evil" lies. It’s a toxic, power-imbalanced mess that inevitably ends in blood.
The Legacy of the Bird Girl
You know the statue. The "Bird Girl" by Sylvia Shaw Judson. Before the book and the movie, it was a quiet, largely unknown piece of art in Bonaventure Cemetery. After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 1997, it became a cultural icon. It had to be moved to the Telfair Museums because tourists were literally chipping pieces off of it or trampling the graves nearby.
This is the "Midnight Effect."
The movie turned Savannah from a sleepy Southern city into a global tourist destination. It changed the economy of the town forever. Even if the film isn't a "perfect" adaptation, its impact on the real-world location is undeniable. People still flock to Mercer House. They still look for the bench from the poster (which wasn't even a real bench—it was a prop).
Critically, the movie holds a 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s a "rotten" score, which feels unfair. It’s better than a 51. But it’s not a 90. It’s a solid 75 for anyone who loves Southern Gothic atmosphere. It suffers from being too long and perhaps too respectful of the source material in some ways, while being too "Hollywood" in others. It’s a bit of a contradiction.
But then again, so is Savannah.
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What You Should Do Next
If you’ve seen the movie and loved the vibe, don't stop there. The film is only a surface-level scratch of the actual history.
Read the book. Seriously. John Berendt’s prose captures the nuances of the legal trials—especially the details of the four separate trials—in a way the film never could. The book spends much more time on the eccentric neighbors who were cut from the movie, like the man who walked a "ghost dog" or the guy who carried a bottle of poison to kill the entire town's water supply.
Visit Savannah, but skip the "Movie Tours." If you go, go to the Telfair Academy to see the Bird Girl statue in person, but then just walk the squares yourself. The movie was filmed on location, so you can see the Mercer House (429 Bull Street) easily. It’s still private, though it offers tours now.
Watch the Lady Chablis’s interviews. If you want to see the real heart of the film, look up old footage of The Grand Empress herself. She was a pioneer, and her real-life story is arguably more interesting than the murder trial that framed the movie.
Look into the real Danny Hansford. History often paints him as just a "troubled youth," but the reality of his relationship with Jim Williams was incredibly complex and dark. Understanding the power dynamics of 1980s Georgia adds a whole new layer of weight to the 1997 film.
The movie isn't just a 90s relic. It’s a portal into a very specific version of the American South that was just beginning to vanish. It's about the masks people wear and what happens when those masks slip at midnight. Whether you think it's a masterpiece or a slog, you can't deny that it has a mood that most modern films are too afraid to touch. It’s messy, it’s slow, and it’s beautiful. Just like the city it depicts.