In the Electric Mist. 2009. USA. Directed by Bertrand Tavernier. Screenplay by Jerzy Kromolowski, Mary Olson-Kromolowski, based on a book by James Lee Burke. With Tommy Lee Jones, John Goodman, Peter Sarsgaard, Mary Steenburgen. DCP. 117 min.
In this swampland mystery, set in modern Louisiana’s Iberia Parish, the past threatens to overtake the present. Tommy Lee Jones plays a disillusioned detective investigating a mystery that brings together the Civil War, a Hollywood film shoot, a struggling community’s battle with drugs and addiction, and mafia violence. Haunted, like some latter-day Faulkner hero, by the ghosts of the South, Jones’s detective delves further into himself with each new turn in the mystery. Every man has a past, and so does every place containing him.
French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier confronts the murkiness of this idea with a subtle but gradually overwhelming sense of gravity, a bayou melancholy—itself colored by post-Katrina poverty—painting Louisiana’s deepest reaches as a place where secrets never die, but thrive in darkness.