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Alan Parker (Midnight Express, Angel Heart) will never be a better director. He has always had a taste and talent for sudden violence, for making it explode out of ordinary contexts. That talent is well employed in Mississippi Burning: a scene in which a black congregation emerges from an evening prayer meeting to confront a silent group of hooded Klansmen, clubs at the ready, is a little masterpiece of terror.
But what truly distinguishes this film is Parker's acute reimagining of a time and place. The frightened silence of the black community (and the astonishing courage of some of its members); the sullen resentment of "outsiders" from the white community; the alternately bland, sneering and self-righteous denials by the local lawmen that any crime was committed at all; the steadily mounting campaign of violence intended to terrorize everyone into complicity in this lie -- all of this is handled with a deft and compulsive power.
That power finally sweeps away one's resistance to the film's major improbability. It asks us to believe that the FBI, in those days still under J. Edgar Hoover's dictatorship, would have mounted an elaborate sting operation to bring the murderers at last to some rough justice under federal anticonspiracy statutes. That seems unlikely, especially given Hoover's hatred of Martin Luther King and his allies. Still, narrow historical criticism somehow seems irrelevant to a movie that so powerfully reanimates the past for the best of reasons: to inform the spirit of today and possibly tomorrow.