Rob Reiner's "Ghosts of Mississippi" is plain old-time Hollywood prejudice. By CHARLES TAYLOR the story that Maryanne Vollers tells in her superb book "Ghosts of Mississippi" — about the 1963 murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers and the conviction of his killer, Byron De La Beckwith, 30 years and three trials later — is a tale of people setting aside a history of prejudice, corruption and abiding racial suspicion to do one simple thing: put a murderer behind bars. The press material for Rob Reiner's atrocious new movie, "Ghosts of Mississippi," tells us, "Once [screenwriter] Lewis Colick finished his investigative trip to Mississippi, he returned home with a voluminous amount of information that was somewhat difficult to hone down to a feature-length script." That strikes me as a hell of a lot of legwork for what's essentially a boilerplate Hollywood take on the racist South. "Ghosts of Mississippi" (the filmmakers optioned only Vollers' title; she gets no credit, though it's difficult to imagine Colick's screenplay without her book) returns us to the morally comfortable stereotype of Southern whites as grotesques resentful of anything that disturbs their gracious way of life. When we see '90s country-club whites using the word "nigger" in front of a black waiter, or complaining about a "Jew lawyer," Reiner and Colick are cuing us to see the modern version of Medgar Evers' murderers in their new social disguises. And it's de rigueur that when young assistant DA Bobby De Laughter (pronounced "dee-lawter" and played by Alec Baldwin with the blandness that characterizes his leading roles) decides to retry the case, he'll suffer threatening phone calls, his car being defaced and a bomb threat to his family. It apparently never occurred to anyone making the movie to ask how — if no real change has occurred in the South for 30 years — Beckwith was eventually tried, let alone convicted? Not that the decision to retry him was a popular one. Nobody would deny that Mississippi — by far the most intransigent to change of any Southern state — still has strains of the racism that made it a nightmare. But there were other obstacles to Beckwith's retrial, which Vollers lays out. Some people complained that taxpayers' money was being wasted on a show trial, a delayed public atonement for past sins. Others worried that Beckwith's right to a speedy trial was being violated, that it was unfair to retry an ailing old man. (He was 70 at the time of his indictment.) More subtly, there was, Vollers suggests, the simple, understandable human reluctance of Southerners to become, once again, racist monsters in the eyes of America. Reiner and Colick try to act as if they're making an adult drama about how difficult it is for entrenched attitudes to change. But really, I think it would have been easier for them if they just could have shown the whites in the movie making Klan hoods out of the family linens. In real life De Laughter's marriage, troubled before he took on the Evers case, broke up while he was preparing for the trial. In the movie, that's because his wife (Virginia Madsen), a well-bred daughter of the South, is just too, too embarrassed by what her husband is doing. There's nothing wrong with the decision to make the movie a courtroom thriller (that's essentially what the book is). But a courtroom thriller needs an ace filmmaker, and despite his consistent acclaim as a mainstream movie craftsman, Rob Reiner is still a clumsy, obvious director. He uses the sheen of professionalism to disguise an absence of pacing and style; and here even the sheen looks a little shabby. There are scenes where De Laughter talks to his children — explaining who Medgar Evers was and why it's important to bring his killer to justice — that are transparent little lessons in historical morality for the audiences. When the movie needs a jolt, Reiner tosses in a shock-cut of De Laughter's little boy getting socked in the nose by a racist kid, or a reprise of Evers' murder. You know you're in for it in the credits when, accompanied by a gospel number, we see a hackneyed montage of the black experience in America. Whoopi Goldberg, who can be a marvelous actress, is a good instinctive choice for Myrlie Evers, but did she have to approach the role as if she were doing Coretta Scott King by way of the Dalai Lama? When you see the real Myrlie Evers in the documentary "Eyes on the Prize" talking about being seized with a desire to take a machine gun and mow down every white face she saw in the moments after her husband's murder, you know immediately just how hard-won her composure is. Goldberg's performance is all about Quiet Dignity and Noble Carriage. When, in Vollers' book, Evers and De Laughter are waiting for the verdict and she tells him she's gotten good at waiting, it's a wry joke. Here, it's a lesson for us all in serene detachment. Perhaps the most remarkable character in the whole tale is also the puniest (in every way), Beckwith. A pipsqueak peckerwood who told reporters, "Ah didn' kill Medgah Evahs, but he's shoooo daid," he's like a murderous cartoon hillbilly as written by Jim Thompson. And James Woods' performance is so showy and, from moment to moment, so unbelievable, that I can't imagine it won't get him an Oscar nomination. His ticks and his makeup will win praise for his "acting" the way De Niro's weight gain for "Raging Bull" did. What's missing is any sense of how threatening a puny man can be, the danger behind Beckwith's ridiculousness. The best performance here is a small one from Lloyd "Benny" Bennett, playing himself. Bennett, one of De Laughter's investigators, is a bearish man with a gentle, ingratiating presence. Bennett, who struck up an instinctive friendship with Myrlie Evers, provides one of the book's best moments. When he tells her his father was one of the detectives investigating her husband's murder, she says, guiltily, "Oh, Benny. Do you know that I must have hated your father?" Bennett responds, "In your position, I would have felt the same way." That's an example of Vollers' true subject, the capacity for people to change. When, at the end of the film, the guilty verdict is greeted by cheering throngs of black and white swarming the courthouse steps, you wonder, "Where the hell did they come from?" In this movie, the people who aren't frozen in history are the real ghosts. Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon. Share your thoughts on Rob Reiner's latest film in the movie section of Table Talk.