All of that is missing from Eastwood's film--along with a sense of purpose, urgency, mystery, and, good God, brevity. At a butt-numbing 155 minutes, sitting through Eastwood's version of Berendt's bestseller is like watching someone feed the whole book into a shredder one damned page at a time.

Part Southern Gothic, part warped travel memoir, Berendt's book (credited here as a novel) centers on a flamboyant Savannah antiques dealer, Jim Williams, accused of killing his volatile roughneck lover. Visiting Savannah, Berendt found himself swept along in the wake of the ensuing trial. The trial is by far the least interesting part. Instead, the fun comes from watching the author sidetracked at every turn by glamorous oddballs--piano-pounding squatters, voodoo priestesses, pistol-packing Southern belles, and, most memorably, the lip-synching transvestite prima donna The Lady Chablis.

The unexpected success of Berendt's book boosted Savannah's tourist trade by tens of millions of dollars, and readers flocked to see his subjects in the flesh. (Visiting Savannah these days is like attending a museum of curiosities run by the curiosities.) However good this kind of popularity is for promotion, though, it's hell on the adapter, who faces a chorus of outrage if he omits an incident or a character. That makes it hard to do the chopping and rethinking needed to translate a literary work to film. Adapting Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is doubly tough: The best parts of the book are asides and chance encounters, and the central story--the trial--is woefully short on surprises.

Eastwood and screenwriter John Lee Hancock make two critical mistakes that basically dumb down the material. The first is turning the worldly Berendt of the book into "John Kelso" (John Cusack), a naive, youthful writer lulled into the confidence of suave, sardonic Williams (Kevin Spacey). Berendt, of course, is an active participant in the book's events, but the movie has him playing detective and assisting the defense! The guy's a novelist, not Nancy Drew.

The other problem is that the filmmakers have no idea whose story they're telling--Kelso's, Williams', or Savannah's. To compensate, they've attempted to film everything in the book without any particular point of view, which weakens one of its chief strengths: its depiction of the connecting tissues of Savannah society. The scene of The Lady Chablis invading a black cotillion with Berendt, so hilarious in the book, falls flat here without explanation or context. At the same time, the movie tries to wedge in all the book's incidental characters, which stretches the movie to agonizing overlength. The movie doesn't proceed by anecdote so much as by syllabus.

On the plus side are Kevin Spacey's shrewd, devilish Williams, Jack Thompson as Williams' jocular attorney, The Lady Chablis as herself, and some gorgeous Johnny Mercer tunes. Savannah looks great too: Through Jack N. Green's lens, the sunlight is always just a little too bright, and shadows drape the streets like cobwebs. There's a great opening shot, and if you last through the movie, there's a great closing shot.