"Mississippi Burning" has both insight and intelligence and it is an incredibly uncompromising scrutinization of how racism blighted American society and it is frightening to think the residents of Jessop in Mississippi possess minds much smaller than their town. This film also prompts you to seriously examine your own conscience in relation to the matter of the race issue, but how many people will actually be enthusiastically prepared to carry out such a thing? And how many of us will be shocked to discover something of Mayor Tilman in ourselves: we know all about what is going on and yet we choose to do nothing about it? That is the real lasting power of this superb film and that is why it will continue to have great longevity and deservedly so.
When three men go missing from their small-town Mississippi home, the FBI sends a team to investigate. "Anderson" (Gene Hackman) is very much the more hands-on of the pair leading the team, with "Ward" (Willem Dafoe) more inclined to play by the book. Their arrival exposes them to an open culture of racial hatred that's not only tolerated by the local sheriff "Stuckey" (Gailard Sartain) but enthusiastically supported by his deputy "Pell" (Brad Dourif). Their arrival only seems to empower the bigots as more Negro property is trashed or razed to the ground and the people themselves subjected to increasingly dangerous violence. The audience watching this know the local dynamic and who is pulling the strings, so the thrust of this rather potent look at the ghastliness going on here comes as we follow the differing styles of policing these men use to get to the bottom of things - and in a way that will make the equally complicit judicial system sit up and take note. With a media carnival only fanning the flames and tempers flying on both sides, the agents put into place a complex sting operation to turn the weapons of these intimidators into the very things that will hopefully entrap them. Hackman and Dafoe make for a formidable coupling in this well written and presented thriller that shines an unashamed light on the toxic attitudes of the white population whose concern for the missing men amounted to little more than "they got whet they deserved". Dourif is also on good form as his truly odious character emerges - not just against his black neighbours, but against his own wife (Frances McDormand) too. Alan Parker and Chris Gerolmo have created a palpably criminal scenario here and the ensemble deliver well that sense of fear, loathing and superiority. The photography captures well this increasingly menacing, dark and swamp-infested environment and by the denouement I did feel that this was all a perfectly plausible train of events in the mid-1960s USA.
