Alan Parker’s thriller about racist violence is worth seeing for its tension and performances, especially Gene Hackman’s. But its FBI-led story leaves the black community too little space to speak or act.
Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning is a good police thriller whose choice of heroes limits what it can say about racial terror. It follows FBI agents investigating the disappearance of civil rights workers in rural Mississippi in 1964, and keeps the pressure on their enquiries. Parker wants us angry at the racism and anxious about what the investigators will find. That concentration makes the case absorbing, but it also gives those investigators too much of our attention.
Gene Hackman makes Agent Rupert Anderson compelling company, and that is both the film’s advantage and part of its trouble. His performance has humour and danger without making either look like an actor’s demonstration; Willem Dafoe, as Agent Alan Ward, is effective but less absorbing. We felt uneasy during the agents’ attempts to question the locals, because the hostility makes even an ordinary enquiry feel unsafe. These scenes make the investigation gripping before the story needs to increase the violence.
Frances McDormand’s Mrs Pell matters because she briefly makes a life outside the investigation feel worth following for its own sake. McDormand allows fear to be quiet, which is welcome in a film that often presses hard for a response. Brad Dourif, playing Deputy Clinton Pell, is a more abrasive presence, and the contrast helps the scenes involving local people resist becoming mere stages in the agents’ progress. There is enough in these performances to sustain a longer look at the town’s inhabitants.
Peter Biziou’s cinematography makes the town feel hostile even during the enquiries, when the film could settle for photographing people talking. The barbershop visit benefits from that attention to place: Anderson is investigating on somebody else’s ground. Production designers Philip Harrison and Geoffrey Kirkland make these ordinary surroundings convincing enough that the hostility does not need a sinister backdrop. Their work helps the threat feel like part of daily life there.
Gerry Hambling’s editing keeps the enquiries moving, and the film rarely gives us time to settle after an ugly encounter. It is efficient thriller work, although the pressure becomes wearing when every scene seems to demand the same level of alarm. Trevor Jones’s music contributes to that insistence; its prompting is less useful when the performances have already made the danger clear. The later stretches also push towards exaggeration, weakening the credibility built by the earlier conversations.
The larger problem belongs to Chris Gerolmo’s screenplay, which gives the federal agents the scope to act while black characters are too often left to suffer. A police procedural can reasonably follow the police, but this one uses racial persecution to supply the urgency and then gives too little space to black resistance. That matters even if we accept the story as fiction. We learn much more about how the agents work than how the community survives.
As a crime thriller, the film earns its place through Parker’s command of tension and a cast worth watching even when the writing simplifies them. The historical setting asks for more than the familiar satisfaction of capable agents confronting vicious men. Watch it for Hackman and McDormand, but do not treat it as a history of the people they encounter.
