No escape from hatred in 'Jasper'

By Allan Johnson
Chicago Tribune

•	'Jasper, Texas' 5 tonight Showtime

But the docudrama "Jasper, Texas" (today at 5 p.m. on Showtime) comes up short, partly because it lacks the emotion felt in a PBS documentary on the subject that aired earlier this year, one that revealed a year's worth of different reactions of both the black and white people living through the ordeal.

Coming on the heels of the fifth anniversary of the death of James Byrd Jr., "Jasper, Texas" looks at the firestorm touched off after three racists chained the hitchhiking Byrd to a pickup truck and dragged him to his death.

In particular, the film focuses on several town officials who admittedly were in over their heads in dealing with the murder and its aftermath, including the town's black mayor (Louis Gossett Jr.) and white sheriff (Jon Voight).

"Jasper is in trouble. It could go up just like Los Angeles," R.C. Horn (Gossett) says.

Meanwhile, Billy Rowles (Voight) tries to keep it together in what is only his second murder case: "I don't know what a hate crime is, I mean, exactly the strict legal wording, but I think that's what we got here."

What made the PBS documentary "Two Towns of Jasper" so interesting — and what is not dealt with more effectively in "Jasper, Texas" — are the black and white citizens themselves, polarized with vastly different views of one another.

The whites were mostly mistrustful and racist against the blacks, while the blacks were mistrustful and even afraid of the actions of some of the bigoted whites. So when Horn declares the town is "about loving each other," it flies in the face of the realities that existed there.

This oversight doesn't diminish the performances of Voight and Gossett, who become comrades-in-arms in trying to keep a lid on their town, while seeking to make sure the three men are brought to justice.

Nor does it offset powerful, quickly seen images of Byrd's (Roy T. Anderson) dragging, or what appears to be crime-scene photos of the real Byrd's disfigured body. Also effective is a clash between the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers.

Those photos, and the movie itself, show that no matter how evolved humankind claims to be, it will never escape hatred.