I remember reading a commentary about movies adapted from John Grisham novels back when his writing career was at its highest. The commentary’s author was wondering why so many of these adaptations fell flat, working off the idea most of them had a rather cinematic feel to them anyway and the screenplay would only need to punch up the ending a bit. For years, the only two adaptations I had seen were The Firm and The Pelican Brief. These were two movies with impressive casts and, in the case of The Firm, a really nice piano-based soundtrack. But neither of them were any better than maybe a little above average.
But I had heard A Time to Kill was good, and it looks like it was on HBO Max just for this month for some reason.
Small town attorney Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) has a new client that everyone knows is guilty. He’s Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L Jackson), and he murdered two men in a public place and wounded a sheriff’s deputy. However, Carl Lee had a reason for it: the two men, both white, brutally raped his ten year old daughter. There were plenty of witnesses to the rape, including the girl herself who managed to survive the attack despite the two men’s best efforts. But Brigance had told Carl Lee in a previous conversation that there was a good chance the men could walk, and Carl Lee didn’t want that to happen, so he shot them both to death in a courthouse with even more witnesses. But this is Mississippi, Carl Lee is a black man in a mostly white county, and the politically ambitious prosecutor Rufus Buckley (Kevin Spacey, perhaps trying out his Frank Underwood accent) would love to get another notch on his belt for a law-and-order based campaign for governor. Jake doesn’t have much in the way of resources, Carl Lee can’t afford to pay him, and everyone saw him do it. And that’s not getting into the race angle, something which would seem to greatly put Carl Lee in a great deal of legal trouble, the sort where a fairly young lawyer without a lot of resources will have his work cut out for him regardless.
That is not to say Brigance is working alone. He has his disbarred, alcoholic mentor Lucien Wilbanks (Donald Sutherland), an activist law student willing to research for free (Sandra Bullock), and his divorce lawyer pal Harry (Oliver Platt). On the other hand, one of Carl Lee’s victims has a brother (Kiefer Sutherland) who figures it may be time to bring the Klan back to his corner of the state. Between the media circus and the white supremacists, it is going to be a tough time for Brigance to get anything done, let alone to win the case and keep Carl Lee out of prison, let alone off Death Row.
I had heard this was the best of the various Grisham adaptations, and that is a correct statement based on the handful I have seen. This actually is a pretty good legal drama with a lot of explosive scenes, some of them literal explosions. It’s not perfect. The Southern accents are all over the map. McConaughey’s is his usual Texan twang, so he’s fine. The rest range from the maybe decent (Spacey) to the cartoonish (Donald Sutherland) to the outright bad (Platt). Likewise, hiring Jackson means there probably should be a scene or two where he has to shout, but I like it when he shouts, so no complaints there.
As a reflection on race and racial justice, A Time to Kill is maybe a decent first step. Plenty of 90s movies about race and racial justice were about the white person who just suddenly gets it and works to make a difference while the black people who were on the receiving end were often little better than just there. This movie does do a bit of that, with the added bit that Carl Lee sometimes has a bit of wisdom on how people react when pressed. But as a legal drama, it works quite well, and while I haven’t as of yet read any of Grisham’s novels, this movie also hasn’t changed my mind on that. It’s not the next incarnation of To Kill a Mockingbird, but as legal dramas go, I found it enjoyable all the same.
Grade: B
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