Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)

Journalist John Cusack travels to Savannah to research a piece for Town and Country on one of Kevin Spacey’s lavish Christmas parties. On the evening of the party after the guests have all left, local prostitute Jude Law is found dead with Spacey holding the gun. I had forgotten this was based on a nonfiction book and was really expecting a courtroom drama a la John Grisham. Instead, it plays more like a travelogue of Savannah and the eccentric characters who live there; the murder and trial being a secondary focus. Told from the perspective of a square outsider over the course of more than two and a half hours, it lacks focus and doesn’t seem to have much to do after introducing the quirky residents.