Jacksonville Times-Union
Sunday April 26, 1998

No matter how much the South changed over the years, it stayed relatively the same on the big screen--dangerous, charming and quirky with small-town and racist themes. But recent films show Hollywood's outsider view of the area may slowly be changing.

     Ulee's Gold

By Matt Soergel  
Times-Union movie writer 

At the counter of a diner in Wahzoo City, Ala., New Yorker Joe Pesci looks with dismay at a plate of white mush placed in front of him.

"What's this over here?"

The counterman is taken aback. "You never heard o' grits?"

"Sure, sure, I heard of grits," Pesci says. "I just actually never seen a grit before. . . . What's a grit?"

It's a funny throwaway line in My Cousin Vinny, a 1991 culture-clash comedy about New Yorkers and the South. But it's also a moment that says a lot about how movies of the '90s approach the contemporary South.

No matter that much of the South now resembles a bland Anywhere, U.S.A., with Barnes & Noble stores, strip malls, gated communities and 24-screen megaplex theaters.

In movies, the South is still an exotic place, as foreign as . . . well, grits.

And part of the attraction of setting a movie in the South is simple: For all its homogenization, there's still no place else like it.

"The South is the last great regional culture," said Florida State University history professor Neil Jumonville. "It's a shorthand. You don't have to go into a lengthy explanation about it."

So in movie shorthand, the South is sometimes dangerous. Sometimes charming. Almost always quirky. And far different from the lives of those in the movie-making centers of California and New York.

For many outsiders, the South is "the errant but beguiling Other." That's how University of Mississippi English professor David Galef puts it. "There's sort of two depictions of the South, the heartwarming small town aspect, and the ugly racist vision," he said. "And you sometimes get them in the same film. I don't see too much else."

Whatever version it chooses, Hollywood gets it wrong almost all the time, says Tallahassee filmmaker Victor Nunez.

"It riles my good old Southern hackles at times," admits Nunez, who last year released Ulee's Gold with Peter Fonda as a Florida Panhandle beekeeper.

Most movies set in the South, he complains, are full of bad accents and simplistic racial attitudes.

"Not that the South's a perfect place, a model for the world today, but it's changed," Nunez said. "Those kinds of movies are referring back to a cliched view of the South."

There are signs, though, that the view might be changing--a little--especially in smaller-budget independent films such as Ulee's Gold.

Take The Apostle, for which Robert Duvall got a deserved Oscar nomination as an evangelical preacher on a first-name basis with God. Duvall, who raised the money for the movie himself, made his character a real person, a minister who cobbles together a congregation of blacks and whites, a man both good and bad.

But he was still an exotic: Even though Duvall, a Southerner, played him without a hint of condescension, it's easy to see that non-Southerners could find him a curious creature--a bandy-legged man stuffed into too-tight shirts, with a fiery faith that practically begs to be studied by a group of graduate students.

Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade also painted a fairly realistic view of the small-town South. But it trafficked heavily in Southern gothic, complete with a horrific act of violence at the end.

Then there is a host of movies based on novels by Mississippian John Grisham. Apart from A Time to Kill, which looked at a Southern town torn by racial violence, their settings were mostly incidental.

"They could be set in Tanzania," Galef said. "They're fairly generic."

That could be seen as a good thing, though, a sign that the South is more and more like everywhere else. That attitude in movies is still a rarity, though.

"To them, it's a foreign land," said Jacksonville University history professor S. Walker Blanton, who specializes in the South.

For the trip to that foreign land, Hollywood figures, viewers almost always will need a guide, a surrogate, someone from the outside to guide them through this strange place called the South.

It could be John Cusack's magazine writer in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Michael J. Fox's Northern doctor in Doc Hollywood or Pesci and Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny.

It could even be Steven Seagal in Fire Down Below as a guitar-playing, martial arts-using EPA agent fighting evil in an Appalachian mining town, helping the distrustful, hapless yokels there.

Then there was Adrian Lester's eager campaign worker in Primary Colors. Even though his character was the grandson of a civil rights leader, he was an outsider repelled and attracted to a charismatic Southern politician with a hankering for barbecue and illicit affairs.

Primary Colors makes its message clear: This isn't a politician from Anywhere, U.S.A.

Many movies set in the South--going all the way back to 1915's The Birth of a Nation--deal with the issue of race, of whites and blacks clashing or trying to live together.

"That's literally always been the hallmark of Southern literature and movies, hasn't it?'' said Princeton University film scholar Michael Wood.

The latest examples of that came in a couple of recent movies set in the contemporary South. Ghosts of Mississippi and A Time to Kill looked at racism of a particularly virulent form. But both took heat for telling for their stories through the eyes of heroic white attorneys (Alec Baldwin and Matthew McConaughey, respectively).

Southern blacks have not been well represented in recent movies, notes Velma Cato. She's a Los Angeles documentary filmmaker who recently made Small Steps, Big Strides: The Black Experience in Hollywood (1903-1970) for American Movie Classics.

"I can't think of any one movie done about the contemporary black South, which is sort of interesting," she said. "In many ways it has a lot more to offer than other places in the country. Blacks in the South have long been established as doctors and lawyers, because they had to be. It would be interesting to see movies about them, wouldn't it?''

Cato, a native of Memphis, Tenn., liked last year's Eve's Bayou, a story about a well-off black family in Louisiana. It, however, was set in the early '60s, a long way from the New South.

Eve's Bayou did, however, fit in neatly with an old tradition of Southern storytelling. It's Southern gothic - a convoluted story with the pervasive sense that mystery and violence and age-old secrets are hiding just behind the Spanish moss.

To Nunez, Southern gothic stories are a time-honored way of looking at the complex place called the South. "There's something healthy," he said, "about being able to look at yourself, to be able to see the sins of our past, or of our present for that matter. My view of the South is that we're much more aware of our warts and wrinkles, and we're trying to deal with them."