Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning isn't just simmering in hatred -- it's full-on marinated in it. (It's telling that non-American directors are more than willing to expose America's hideousness.) It may have been a few decades after the film's setting but as the coming years would also show, very little had changed.
Frustratingly, for a film about the civil rights movement, Mississippi Burning doesn't put a lot of focus on the Black characters. Preferring to spotlight the agents played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, the film only gives the Black characters any attention when they're about to be subjected to violence, as they're being brutalized, or as they're licking their figurative and literal wounds -- in other words, they only exist to suffer. Were this made today, that would absolutely not happen.
That aspect aside, Mississippi Burning is captured stunningly by cinematographer Peter Biziou. You can practically feel the Mississippi heat through the screen, the smell of the swamps. It's little wonder that Biziou was a regular for Parker (and that his work got him an Oscar).
Mississippi Burning is very much not an easy watch. (Then again, what else would one expect from the man responsible for Midnight Express the previous decade?) To say things have changed since both the setting's time period and the film's release would be a colossal lie. If anything, we're repeating what had happened ad nauseam.
My Rating: ****