MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL

By RICHARD CORLISS

John Berendt's nonfiction best seller has yet to appear between soft covers. So the film, directed by Clint Eastwood, serves as the audiovisual paperback version. It is likely to disappoint the book's acolytes and tax the patience of newcomers.

Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey) deals in antiques and other old secrets, with a suavity that beguiles the gentry. When he kills a young punk who was his lover, Williams loses a few friends but attracts the attention of a Yankee journalist (John Cusack) who becomes his fond, skeptical biographer.

Screenwriter John Lee Hancock fuses Williams' four murder trials into one but is faithful to the local fauna: the gun-waving doyen, the man who walks an invisible dog, the voodoo priestess, the man haloed by horseflies. Eastwood has cast Williams' attorney as the trial judge and, as him(her)self, the Lady Chablis, a drag queen of note--one note--in a turn that will make no one forget Jaye Davidson.

Like the way-too-wide-eyed Cusack, Eastwood lingers over these mild deviates from the norm as if they were the critter in Alien Autopsy. This film might have trusted more in Spacey's sly glamour, and in Williams as a wily game player to the death. Possibly his own.

--By Richard Corliss