TV REVIEWS : Psychological Insight Shapes ‘Paris Trout’

Dennis Hopper has the title role in the moody, deceptively relaxed “Paris Trout” (premiering on Showtime tonight at 9), playing a small-town Southern merchant confident that he can get away with murder. That’s because it’s 1949 and his victim, whom he shot in a fit of anger, is a 12-year-old black girl whose older brother he has tried to cheat in a car deal.

Adapted by Pete Dexter from his own novel, “Paris Trout” is not, however, a conventional courtroom drama/social protest tract. Dexter and director Stephen Gyllenhaal are concerned with revealing the racism that the humorless, tight-lipped Trout embodies so totally as a form of madness to which an entire community and, in particular, Trout’s wife (Barbara Hershey) and his attorney (Ed Harris) are vulnerable.

The more Trout rages in his bigoted mendacity, the more Hershey and Harris find their consciousnesses raised whether they like it or not. Hershey is confronted with the fact that the man she was attracted to for his seeming directness and sureness is in fact a scared and scary monster. By the same token, no amount of traditional sense of loyalty to his own people can induce Harris to defend his client blindly. Part of the truth facing these two people includes the fact that they are deeply attracted to each other.

Filmed on Georgia locations, “Paris Trout,” a work of persuasive psychological insight, has the lazy, sensual quality of a hot summer’s day in the South. Trout is yet another of Hopper’s repellent yet riveting crazies. Hershey and Harris are just right as two intelligent people having difficulty in accepting that they are slipping into a highly dangerous trap.