What Berendt’s book does have is a page-turning pace and a closely observed appreciation for the eccentricities of social Savannah. What it needed for its transfer to the screen was the cinematic sophistication of a Stephen Frears or even the risk-taking imagination of a real esoteric – say, Nicholas Roeg. Eastwood has approached its wry delectations, demi-monde frissons, and Low Country gallery of rogues like a big-game hunter or a respectful but rather pedantic expeditionary from National Geographic. The atmosphere of Savannah, fecund for intrigues of every sort, has been dispelled by a directorial interpretation and photography that are guidebook glossy and crisp with literalness. The local eccentrics don’t seem to populate scenes; they are the focus of overcomposed, deep-focus camera work, circling pan shots, and cutesy musical cues, as if Eastwood had brought them back to perform in an exhibit at a natural history museum. The melodramatic mythicism that gave the director’s work in his Oscar-winning Unforgiven a dark, haunting quality would have suited this material; instead, we get the staid and static earnestness of The Bridges of Madison County. (Maybe Clint should avoid the siren call of popular fiction.)

The edge of its mystery dulled and its sense of place and character misconveyed, Eastwood’s treatment unfolds as a well-meaning, workmanlike, but inescapably wrongheaded case study in film adaptation. With so much missed, it seems particularly surprising that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is over two-and-a-half hours long.

What it has going for it is a good performance by the unflappable Kevin Spacey as Savannah bon vivant and antiques dealer Jim Williams, who is tried for the murder of a young man who, on volatile and variable terms, had been both in his employ and in his bed. With another director, Spacey might have gone further with Williams’ jaded charm, his irreverent humor, and the carefully manicured parameters of his emotional life. As it is, we sense Spacey struggling in an artistic void and, for once, his famous subtlety becomes a case of less is less. To his great credit, this always resourceful actor manages to catch at least the outline of a slippery personality and to indicate the dichotomies that made Williams such an intriguing subject. The other sparkplugs in this soporific Midnight are The Lady Chablis, a notorious Savannah transvestite performer who plays her/himself, and Jack Thompson, the Australian actor, who does a surprisingly dead-on, down-home turn as Williams’ attorney.