The book is based on a true story. On April 30, 1975, in the small Czech town of Dvür Králové, 49 giraffes (23 of them pregnant) were gunned down and dismembered on government orders. Mr. Ledgard—for the past 11 years a foreign correspondent for The Economist—has fashioned from this bizarre, still unexplained incident a political parable that verges on the Kafkaesque. Stunned and ethereal, Giraffe begins like a dream but ends like a nightmare. Not for nothing is one of its narrators a sleepwalker.

But before we meet the sleepwalker, we meet Snêhurka: “I kick now in the darkness and see a coming light, molten, veined through the membrane and fluids of the sac, which contains me. I am squeezed towards the light. Let it be said: I enter this world without volition.” Not so the reader, who presses greedily on into this new-seen world, especially when the being doing the seeing turns out not to be human: “The first thing I see is my own form, my hoofs impossibly far away, slicked with fluid, and my mazed hide, bloodied, flickering in the haze, burning, as though I am not passing from my mother to the ground, but from the constellation Cameleopardalis into the earth’s atmosphere.”

From here the book gets into what one feels obliged to call its lengthy stride, with Snêhurka and the rest of her tower captured and taken from the scorch of the African Savannah to the gray chill of an Eastern European zoo. Also along for the ride is Emil, a specialist in hemodynamics whose day job is designing space suits for astronauts and whose knowledge of the blood flow of tall creatures has been deemed useful for the transportation. In the company of his charges, though, Emil’s clear-sighted rationalism is soon replaced by a light-headed worship. He can’t get enough of these wondrous beasts “and their rising blood.” “They are impossible,” he tells himself, “there is no such animal.”

Equally impossible, Emil keeps telling us, is life under communist rule, a system whose “youthful symbol is a book of knowledge set alight” and which results in metaphysical stasis—a freeze-frame in which there is “no now and it is possible to live without remembering the year, and to have no sense of time passing.” Hence Emil’s habit of mentally photographing what he sees as images of contentment. “This is what I do when I see beauty. I take a picture, I shutter it with a blink, keep it in my mind, and turn it this way and that until the Communist moment recedes and beauty is in the ascendant.”

Lucky him. As Emil sees it, the rest of the populace is condemned to wandering aimlessly through state-organized chaos—rather like those poor captive giraffes in his charge. Rather, but not quite. In fact, Mr. Ledgard’s book suggests, the Czechs have more in common with the okapi, the giraffe’s smaller cousins. They’ve never had to reach up for their food and have not, therefore, had the giraffe’s grace thrust upon them.

Beauty is the by-product of struggle, of the evolutionary command to adapt or die. But communism seeks to end history by the creation of utopia—literally, a non-place. Non-places call for non-people, of course—hence, Giraffe argues, the air of living death that hung about postwar Eastern Europe. It’s always best, in other words, to stick your neck out.

As a reporter for The Economist, Mr. Ledgard perhaps by definition writes from the right, but novelists need to come at a story from more than one direction if they’re to get anywhere near its truth. Giraffe is as laden down with agitprop as anything by Brecht. Pretty much everyone who talks in it says the same thing—that communism is even less than it’s cracked up to be. Worse, they say it in the same slow, numinous, image-heavy voice. Read aloud at random from the book and you will have no idea who’s talking. This would be a fault in any novel, but in a novel whose specific intent is to make clear the Identikit restrictions of a political system, it spells double trouble.

The good news is that, as the novel builds towards its bloody climax, Mr. Ledgard’s pulse quickens, and his prose grows more supple and muscular. The reason is simple: a new narrator, Jirí, who’s given not to abstract portentousness but to the concrete and tactile. The reluctant gunman hired by the state to kill the giraffes, Jirí takes us through the procedure with precision-detail disgust.

Mr. Ledgard really does serve up a vision of hell here, with Jirí atop a fence ordering a helper to shine a flashlight below the giraffes’ ears, the better for his bullets to penetrate the most vulnerable area of their craniums. Emil, meanwhile, is down on the ground, wading through blood and guts as the beasts are buckled and broken, the better to be thrown onto the trucks that will take them away. As a vision of death in life, it makes the novel’s droopily metaphoric moments look more pallid than ever. Like the communists he despises, Mr. Ledgard should leave the comforts of his ideas and beliefs behind and get to grips with the resistant world.

Christopher Bray, a biographer and journalist, is film critic of The First Post. He lives in London.

You have to get the rhythm of Venice, says the Count, and “the rhythm in Venice is like breathing.” What he means by that is the rise and fall of tides and water pressure. He expands his own theory. He takes in the light (it served Tintoretto and Whistler), its painted quality. After all, is this a city, a plausible city, built on piles as the water rises, or is it just the scarred backdrop in a play about peril, a city that can hardly be mapped, where the stranger must either gain assurance or let himself get lost? (Sometimes it’s a matter of following your nose or some odd, childlike figure in red.) The Count is as arresting as the brass at the start of a Mahler symphony. He’s just three pages, with a knockout exit line. Having shared his theory, he announces: “Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”

Aha! You may be realizing we’ve been here before, with John Berendt’s last book—his only other book—Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A decade later (after he’s read at nearly every bookstore in America), he’s chosen Venice as his new Savannah. It’s another port city, with odd characters and a twisted history. We’ll get a crime and a trial, and we’ll be left not quite sure whether we’ve been reading a new form of thriller or a ravishing travel book. Isn’t the strongest pull left after the last page simply the desire to get yourself to Savannah, or Venice, and to be part of the smoke-and-mirrors routine?

Well, be warned: Mr. Berendt is a tricky narrator, a spellbinder but not entirely straightforward. If you remember, the movie of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—no matter that its director, Clint Eastwood, prides himself on unfussy storytelling—made the most dreadful hash of an intricate book; it was a coarse-grained sieve that couldn’t hold the all-important atmosphere. The City of Falling Angels, I suspect, is a better book, so yes, you may need to alter the way you breathe—and at the same time keep track of the risks of doing so, which seem as obvious as air.

It’s not quite clear whether John Berendt has come to Venice as an author on holiday, a success wandering for fresh material, or as a dangerous man himself, invisible, or anyway indistinct, who’s stirring it all up. There are times when he finds fascinating people who’ll talk to us for a few pages, though we still want the camera to turn to show us Mr. Berendt’s listening face. Is it that of an honest traveler? Or is he a director willing his people to speak their speeches beautifully, yet cryptically enough so that we seldom relax in that summery thing called trust? (And truly, Venice in summer is too much audience.)

Yes, there’s an incident that will lead to a trial—the burning of the Fenice Opera House on the evening of Monday, Jan. 29, 1996, a treasure amid all the other treasures of Venice, a place where five Verdi operas had their premieres. Was the fire the result of negligence or arson? As we begin to realize, flames are all very well—they stay in the memory, they inspire stories and works of art—but accident v. impulse takes you to the very heart of the perplexity of being in Venice. Does human motive rise and fall, just like the tides? Or is it constant, and playful? Or worse?

Not that The City of Falling Angels intends to be anything like as tightly organized as that “thriller” from Savannah. That was a book about a small knot of people, and we knew that even if all of them were lying, some had a darker design. The new book seems at first far more like an anthology of Venetian views and characters, a kind of “People I met while I was thinking about the Fenice fire.” It’s as if The Third Man took time off from wondering about Harry Lime to ask itself where the city of Vienna was keeping its Schiele paintings, how the Prater came to be, and why people of a certain age are inclined to blame “the whole thing” on Vienna. What whole thing? Don’t ask—if you have to ask, start again.

So Mr. Berendt meets glassblowers who’ve blown glass on Murano for generations—and who’ve quarreled just as long. He surveys dark piano nobiles and wonders if they’re rotting, or just waiting for the next ghostly rental. He touches on the uncomfortable story of what happened to the Ezra Pound papers, and Olga Rudge and Jane and Philip Rylands, custodians of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. (Yes, I know they’re real people, real enough to sue—but are they sound?) We learn about an inexplicable suicide. We discover a fierce but very shy lawyer. We meet a man whose special trade is to rid the world of rats, who makes a rat poison for every national culinary taste. We see two dark figures bundle up several hundred of the city’s damnable pigeons in a net. We learn how American money and self-importance meant that the Save Venice foundation split. (That’s a very Venetian story, with two institutions at war in the cause of salvation.)

And all the while, we’re passing the great sites—the Rialto Bridge, Santa Maria Della Salute, the Volpi Palace, slipping back and forth, like the vaporetti or like the tides, with the gondolas like sleek coffins. There will be some readers, I fear, who complain that there’s not enough suspenseful organization, that there are too many diverse strands, that it doesn’t quite add up.

It was all I could do to restrain myself from making a winter reservation for Venice. This is not so much a companion for travelers as a book to carry you away. Venice is not large. You could walk it in a day, getting lost and making the most fabulous discoveries, while hearing Verdi and Vivaldi in the slap of the water, and feeling that Milly Theale, Colonel Cantwell or the sickly gaze of Herr von Aschenbach were following you, as you did your best to keep up with that elusive figure in red. I know, I shouldn’t go farther—there are gloomy, wet narrows in Venice that are the black blood of noir. But this is a haunting book, and if you’ve ever had notions of being an angel, or falling, you’ll love it.

By the way, the title comes from a warning posted on the Salute church in the early 70’s, when the occasional plunge of a carved angel promised deliverance to a passer-by.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

You have to get the rhythm of Venice, says the Count, and “the rhythm in Venice is like breathing.” What he means by that is the rise and fall of tides and water pressure. He expands his own theory. He takes in the light (it served Tintoretto and Whistler), its painted quality. After all, is this a city, a plausible city, built on piles as the water rises, or is it just the scarred backdrop in a play about peril, a city that can hardly be mapped, where the stranger must either gain assurance or let himself get lost? (Sometimes it’s a matter of following your nose or some odd, childlike figure in red.) The Count is as arresting as the brass at the start of a Mahler symphony. He’s just three pages, with a knockout exit line. Having shared his theory, he announces: “Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”

Aha! You may be realizing we’ve been here before, with John Berendt’s last book—his only other book— Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A decade later (after he’s read at nearly every bookstore in America), he’s chosen Venice as his new Savannah. It’s another port city, with odd characters and a twisted history. We’ll get a crime and a trial, and we’ll be left not quite sure whether we’ve been reading a new form of thriller or a ravishing travel book. Isn’t the strongest pull left after the last page simply the desire to get yourself to Savannah, or Venice, and to be part of the smoke-and-mirrors routine?

Well, be warned: Mr. Berendt is a tricky narrator, a spellbinder but not entirely straightforward. If you remember, the movie of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—no matter that its director, Clint Eastwood, prides himself on unfussy storytelling—made the most dreadful hash of an intricate book; it was a coarse-grained sieve that couldn’t hold the all-important atmosphere. The City of Falling Angels, I suspect, is a better book, so yes, you may need to alter the way you breathe—and at the same time keep track of the risks of doing so, which seem as obvious as air.

It’s not quite clear whether John Berendt has come to Venice as an author on holiday, a success wandering for fresh material, or as a dangerous man himself, invisible, or anyway indistinct, who’s stirring it all up. There are times when he finds fascinating people who’ll talk to us for a few pages, though we still want the camera to turn to show us Mr. Berendt’s listening face. Is it that of an honest traveler? Or is he a director willing his people to speak their speeches beautifully, yet cryptically enough so that we seldom relax in that summery thing called trust? (And truly, Venice in summer is too much audience.)

Yes, there’s an incident that will lead to a trial—the burning of the Fenice Opera House on the evening of Monday, Jan. 29, 1996, a treasure amid all the other treasures of Venice, a place where five Verdi operas had their premieres. Was the fire the result of negligence or arson? As we begin to realize, flames are all very well—they stay in the memory, they inspire stories and works of art—but accident v. impulse takes you to the very heart of the perplexity of being in Venice. Does human motive rise and fall, just like the tides? Or is it constant, and playful? Or worse?

Not that The City of Falling Angels intends to be anything like as tightly organized as that “thriller” from Savannah. That was a book about a small knot of people, and we knew that even if all of them were lying, some had a darker design. The new book seems at first far more like an anthology of Venetian views and characters, a kind of “People I met while I was thinking about the Fenice fire.” It’s as if The Third Man took time off from wondering about Harry Lime to ask itself where the city of Vienna was keeping its Schiele paintings, how the Prater came to be, and why people of a certain age are inclined to blame “the whole thing” on Vienna. What whole thing? Don’t ask—if you have to ask, start again.

So Mr. Berendt meets glassblowers who’ve blown glass on Murano for generations—and who’ve quarreled just as long. He surveys dark piano nobiles and wonders if they’re rotting, or just waiting for the next ghostly rental. He touches on the uncomfortable story of what happened to the Ezra Pound papers, and Olga Rudge and Jane and Philip Rylands, custodians of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. (Yes, I know they’re real people, real enough to sue—but are they sound?) We learn about an inexplicable suicide. We discover a fierce but very shy lawyer. We meet a man whose special trade is to rid the world of rats, who makes a rat poison for every national culinary taste. We see two dark figures bundle up several hundred of the city’s damnable pigeons in a net. We learn how American money and self-importance meant that the Save Venice foundation split. (That’s a very Venetian story, with two institutions at war in the cause of salvation.)

And all the while, we’re passing the great sites—the Rialto Bridge, Santa Maria Della Salute, the Volpi Palace, slipping back and forth, like the vaporetti or like the tides, with the gondolas like sleek coffins. There will be some readers, I fear, who complain that there’s not enough suspenseful organization, that there are too many diverse strands, that it doesn’t quite add up.

It was all I could do to restrain myself from making a winter reservation for Venice. This is not so much a companion for travelers as a book to carry you away. Venice is not large. You could walk it in a day, getting lost and making the most fabulous discoveries, while hearing Verdi and Vivaldi in the slap of the water, and feeling that Milly Theale, Colonel Cantwell or the sickly gaze of Herr von Aschenbach were following you, as you did your best to keep up with that elusive figure in red. I know, I shouldn’t go farther—there are gloomy, wet narrows in Venice that are the black blood of noir. But this is a haunting book, and if you’ve ever had notions of being an angel, or falling, you’ll love it.

By the way, the title comes from a warning posted on the Salute church in the early 70’s, when the occasional plunge of a carved angel promised deliverance to a passer-by.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Kenneth Branagh plays Dixieland defense attorney Rick Magruder with more molasses dripping from his often incomprehensible Southern accent than even the Old Vic would consider advisable. Like most successful workaholic professional men in movies these days, Magruder is divorced from his wife Leeanne (Famke Janssen) and often late for his custodial visits to his two children. He drinks a little too much and displays a roving eye early on in the proceedings, much to the amusement of his loyal but not lascivious legal assistant, Lois Harlan, played by Daryl Hannah, who is wasted in a sexless Girl Friday-but-Not-Saturday-Night role.

When Magruder becomes involved with a cocktail waitress named Mallory Doss (Embeth Davidtz), she tells him that she is being stalked by her crazy-as-a-loon religious cultist father, Dixon Doss (Robert Duvall). The title refers to a story Mallory recalls her father used to tell her, frightening her. After Mallory's cat is hanged, and her car torched, Magruder takes legal steps to have her father committed for psychiatric observation. But Dixon escapes from the asylum with the help of his fellow cultists. Threats against Magruder's children follow in short order, and the police are reluctant to take much interest in the case because of Magruder's prior lawsuits against overzealous police officers. He enlists the help of a dissipated detective, played by Robert Downey Jr. with the only semblance of charm in the whole movie.

Certainly, Mr. Branagh has never exuded charm in any accent despite his undeniable technical proficiency, and Ms. Davidtz never relaxes her expression of watchful agitation long enough to provide any behavioral grace notes. Ms. Janssen plays the ex-wife as a complete bitch. Mr. Duvall is made to seem menacing, more by what he is not seen doing than by his own infrequent screen manifestations, and Tom Berenger as Mallory's ex-husband seems to materialize only as comic relief. The climax of the film, fittingly enough, occurs during a hurricane, making all the last-minute maneuverings of the characters dangerous to life and limb; they are threatened both by nature's fury and human evil.

Still, Mr. Altman is not untrue to himself either thematically or stylistically. Like such illustrious predecessors as John Huston, Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah, Mr. Altman tends to go against the grain of feel-good conventions for his audiences. His masterpieces are still McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Nashville (1975), but of his recent work I can make a much stronger case for Short Cuts (1993) and Kansas City (1996) than for The Player (1992), Ready to Wear (1994) and The Gingerbread Man . Perhaps going against the grain is so much the thing to do in these confused times that it has lost its tang as a refreshing change of pace from so-called sentimental "commercialism." Now even the bad mainstream movies are full of gloom and doom, anxiety and terror, paranoia and outright malignancy.

All I know is that The Gingerbread Man was persistently aggravating and exasperating from start to finish; nothing is actually the way it is presented and no one is what they seem to be. At first, out of force of habit, I scolded the characters for their mystifying behavior. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? A few bizarre choices near the end still don't make sense even after the trick-laden plot has been mumblingly explained to me.

There is much rage in The Gingerbread Man , but no passion. There is a kind of retribution, but no redemption. The Gingerbread Man is cold and dismal and ultimately unsatisfying, and yet one feels great risks were not taken, which is unusual for even the worst Altman films.

The Levinson Tapes

Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog , from a screenplay by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, based on the book American Hero by Larry Beinhart, quickly crosses the thin line between mordant satire and facetious burlesque before it finally melts down in a drizzle of mindless nihilism worthy of the wildest ravings on the Internet. The film's producers and publicists couldn't have asked for anything more in the way of a newsy tie-in on the occasion of the movie's wide release than the impending confrontation of President Clinton and Paula Jones.

The President in Wag the Dog gets into hot water just before Election Day by molesting an underage Girl Scout type in the Oval Office, and a special "plumbers" group in the White House basement is mobilized to distract the public from the scandal. This motley crew is led by Robert De Niro's Conrad Brean, a Sloppy Joe media manipulator with the ability to start false rumors by issuing official denials of them from the start. To save the electorally endangered Presidency, Brean decides to fabricate a war with Albania. Why Albania, people ask Brean. Why not, he replies. His comely assistant, Anne Heche's Winifred Ames, never bats an eye as she obeys her mentor's cynical commands with a cellular phone capable of girdling the globe.

There are several precedents for media-created "wars" foisted on the public from The Mouse That Roared (1959) with Peter Sellers, to Canadian Bacon in 1995 with John Candy. But never before has the public been regarded with such condescension and contempt. We'll believe anything, we are told again and again, just because we see it on television. There is some justification for this attitude in Wag the Dog , but the escalating exaggerations become increasingly wearying without any dramatic counterforce or audience raisonneur to lead us part of the way out of the sewer into which the movie's "plumbers" have plunged us.

Still, the movie generates more than a few laughs from the savagely parodied Hollywood producer, Stanley Motss, a mogul to end moguls as played by Dustin Hoffman in an Oscar-worthy, though probably not Oscar-winning, takeoff that may hit too close to home in La-La land. The ego-consumed Stanley becomes cosmically narcissistic as he manufactures patriotic hysteria throughout the land through a mixture of computerized graphics accompanied by maudlin folk songs from the real-life Willie Nelson in the role of Johnny Green, a Willie Nelson clone in the movie.

The crunch comes when Stanley wants to take full producer's credit for his biggest superproduction, even when Brean warns him that everything has to be hush-hush at all costs. Brean's well-meant warnings fall on the deaf ears of the egomaniacal Stanley, and the Secret Service steps in to terminate Stanley with extreme prejudice. And why not? Recent movies have treated the White House as a cross between shooting gallery and den of thieves, and we are beyond being shocked. With all its wisecracks and pratfalls, Wag the Dog is simply, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, déjà vu all over again.

The Color Pink

Alain Berliner's Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), from a screenplay by Chris van der Stappen and Mr. Berliner, is a film about childhood gender confusion in a Belgian company-town suburb with the expected alarums and excursions. Georges du Fresne plays with considerable charm and pathos Ludovic, a little boy who likes to wear dresses, and who develops a crush on a male classmate, much to the consternation of both their families in the too closely knit community in which everyone works for the same employer. Two serious themes are intertwined in this seemingly whimsical mixture of reality and fantasy, the first being parental and social attitudes toward presumed "abnormality" in a child's gender consciousness, and the second the degree to which a company can intervene in the family lives of its employees.

The movie takes the "liberal" attitude that little boys should act like little girls if they are so inclined, even if it means being ostracized by the more conventionally programmed children of both sexes. It is easier to argue that one should love one's child no matter what than to suggest that there are no problems in letting nature take its course. I doubt that this movie will ever be remade by a Hollywood studio, but until it is, American viewers may be unduly complacent in treating this delicate subject as an enjoyable opportunity to demonstrate their enlightenment on the subject in comparison to the outraged Belgian burghers in Ma Vie en Rose . To his credit, Mr. Berliner and his collaborators do not sugarcoat their subject or the pain it entails.

Is Not Broken

Get ready to be electrified! After almost 20 years, a harrowing, potent film has been made from the acclaimed, award-winning, groundbreaking 1979 play Bent , about Hitler's savage persecution of gays in Nazi Berlin. It is not for squeamish Pollyannas, but it will grab serious filmgoers by the heart. This stirring work by Martin Sherman, the marvelous writer whose new play A Madhouse in Goa is currently dazzling New York audiences in an exemplary production with Judith Ivey, made a significant contribution to literature on the Holocaust. I first saw the great Ian McKellen in London, then Richard Gere in the Broadway production, and I was devastated both times. In this imaginatively directed (by illustrious British stage director Sean Mathias, making his screen debut) and sensitively rendered (by an excellent, dedicated cast) film adaptation, Bent is a blazing study of fascist repression and a love that conquers all obstacles, and one of the best films I've seen this year.

It's really two movies. In the first half, you see Hitler's purge of another group besides Jews in the decadent, glamorous midnight cabaret setting of prewar Berlin. Mick Jagger is truly astounding as a sultry-voiced bisexual drag queen named Greta who looks and sings like Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel . His club is the scene of sexual orgies, cocaine, cross-dressing, and strapping Aryan storm troopers who lead double lives. Among the customers are Max (Clive Owen), a broodingly handsome and sexually promiscuous playboy, and his weak, frail, dependent lover Rudy (Brian Webber), who are in trouble with the Gestapo after an affair with a soldier from Ernst Rohm's SA unit during the historically infamous massacre known as the "Night of the Long Knives." Ian McKellen, star of the original London production, now plays Max's prissy-mouthed, frightened Uncle Freddie, who tries to get Max and Rudy out of Germany but fails. They flee with only the clothes on their backs, get themselves captured and on the train to Dachau, Max experiences the first of many traumatic debasements at the hands of a brutal Gestapo agent (Rupert Graves), including the fatal beating of Rudy, the boy he loves.

The second half shows the horrors of the concentration camp, where Max pretends to be a Jew to avoid wearing the dreaded pink triangle with which the Nazis identified and labeled homosexuals. Max survives by suspending himself from reality, repeating "This isn't happening" again and again, and you can't help but wonder how many innocent victims under German domination said the same thing. Determined to drive him insane, the sadistic guards assign Max the task of carrying big, heavy rocks from one side of a slag pit to the other side, all day long, then back again, with only three-minute "rest" intervals taken while standing at rigid attention. Despite his resolve, Max develops a bond with a fellow inmate (Lothaire Bluteau, the Canadian actor best known for his role in Jesus of Montreal ) and their demonstration of physical love-even though they are forbidden to touch-ends up being both their salvation and undoing.

It's amazing how much terror and suspense Bent gets out of leather boots marching through wet leaves or winter scenes in the all-white rock pile, surrounded by electric fences. And the emotional subtext is overwhelming. This is one of the best films ever made about one of life's most important lessons: You can break the body, but you cannot destroy the indomitable human spirit. It's a lesson aggressors in war always learn too late. As Max comes to terms with his sexual identity and dons the badge of his humanity with pride and dignity, I predict many filmgoers will dissolve in tears. Bent is not depressing. It's uplifting and life-affirming-a film of rare power, passion and cinematic brilliance. It sheds new light on the blackest chapter in the history of the civilized world, but at a time when so many are politically, emotionally and spiritually re-examining their own gender roles in society, it takes on fresh relevance, both topical and timeless.

Savannah Never

Looked So Dull

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , the publishing phenomenon by John Berendt, has been on the best-seller list for three years, captivated readers in 20 languages and attracted an invasion of tourists to Savannah, Ga. Once they get a look at the slick, sluggish bore Clint Eastwood has made, the tourists may head in the opposite direction, toward one of those signs that says "You Are Now Leaving the City Limits-Y'all Come Again!"

With its steamy gumbo of Southern gothic murder, sex and puttin' on airs, they said this rich and sprawling Faulknerian saga could never be condensed into a cohesively satisfying movie. They were right. One of the most eagerly anticipated films of 1997 has been ambushed and has become one of the year's biggest disappointments. John Cusack is all wrong as the Town and Country reporter who arrives in antebellum Savannah to write a simple 500-word piece about the annual Christmas bash thrown by Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey), an eccentric antiques dealer and pillar of society who dresses in white linen, puffs cigarillos and talks like Tennessee Williams. He also has a violent hustler (Jude Law) for a secret lover. On the night of the party, he blows his boyfriend away and claims self-defense, and Mr. Cusack suspects there's a juicier story than meets the eye, maybe even a book, lurking in the oleanders. That book turned out to be Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , and it is still being devoured by readers weaned on the magnolia-drenched decadence of Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor.

What made the book so appealing was not Jim Williams' murder trial (there were actually four trials) as much as a collage of delicious oddballs who populated its pages, in one journalist's words, "like Gone With the Wind stoned on mescaline": a man walking an imaginary dog on a leash, a flaming drag queen, a society dowager whose husband shot himself while watching Gunsmoke , a weirdo covered with horseflies who carries around a vial of poison threatening to contaminate the water supply, and a bulldog named Uga who is the mascot of the University of Georgia's football team. Mr. Eastwood has all but eradicated them, devoting most of the screen time to the superfluous self-worshipping drag queen Lady Chablis, played with annoying campiness by the real Lady Chablis, who has plenty of attitude and no acting talent whatsoever.

Too much time is spent on the murder trial, which is a big snooze, and on Mr. Cusack, who is sullen and humorless, jumping around nervously like a Method actor on too much caffeine. The real Jim Williams was one of the most controversial figures in Savannah, but in two and a half hours, Kevin Spacey has so little to do that the character never comes to life. The charm of the other characters has been decimated, downgrading an illustrious cast that includes Broadway legend Dorothy Loudon, Oscar-winning actress Kim Hunter (she could have taught them all a thing or two about Tennessee Williams country), exciting newcomer Jude Law and the fine Australian star Jack Thompson, to the status of walk-ons.

Neither Mr. Eastwood nor the screenwriter, John Lee Hancock, ever finds the secret to pulling all of these elements together. The brew they've distilled from this rich and resonant book is nothing more than flat beer. All that cotton-pickin' decadence bears no cinematic fruit. The writer is supposed to be a Truman Capote type-a witty, sardonic observer recording all of these people and events through his unique vision, like a camera. In a blatant departure from the book that defies logic, Mr. Eastwood has invented a fictitious romance for the androgynous writer just to give Alison Eastwood, the director's daughter, a job. It's a subplot that has nothing to do with anything. And the cutesy-pie ending has to be a joke. Why would Lady Chablis end up with the Georgia football team's bulldog?

One interesting thing: The murder takes place in the mansion that was the home of Savannah's most illustrious citizen-songwriter Johnny Mercer-so Mr. Eastwood, a big jazz fan with good taste in music, uses all of those legendary Mercer gems as musical links to thread the disconnected, truncated segments of the film together. Trouble is, he's chosen all the wrong recordings. K.D. Lang singing "Skylark" at the beginning and end is ridiculous, when the classic recordings by Ella Fitzgerald and Sylvia Syms would have been much more haunting. What a mess. This movie starts out lush, then falls apart fast, reducing a treasure of literary jewels to Woolworth clutter.