As I mentioned in my Tár review, this is the time of year when awards bait movies come out. As far as that goes, that means movies that have some level of artistic merit or a message of some kind tend to come out this time of year. And many of them, quite frankly, are quite good. For this past weekend, even with Halloween on the day this review goes live, I opted for the horrors of real life as opposed to the more traditional horror movie. To that end, there probably isn’t much scarier than what happened to Emmett Till in 1955.
I’ll have some reviews for more traditional scary movies for the next couple days. I do tend to limit my reviews to one a day around here, if any.
14 year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) is headed from Chicago to Mississippi to spend two weeks with his sharecropper cousins. His mother Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler) is concerned, worried that her outgoing son Emmett will get himself into trouble even before he leaves. Emmett is a bit of a clown and sometimes speaks with a stutter. He’s about as harmless as a kid can be, and even though the movie makes it clear that Chicago is hardly some sort of racial utopia, it is still a much better place to be than Mississippi. Mamie knows that, and so does the rest of her family either in Mississippi or in Chicago. But does Emmett? Well, he says he does.
Now, I suspect many Americans know the broad outlines of Emmett’s story: for the “crime” of whistling at a white woman, he was lynched. His death was a catalyst for much of the Civil Rights Movement. He wasn’t the first Black person to die that way, not by a long shot, but he became emblematic for just how horrifying the situation was in the Deep South. The thing is, this movie isn’t interested in Till’s death beyond the effect it had on his mother Mamie. Mamie, initially, has no interest in things like anti-lynching legislation or other things her cousin in the NAACP brings up. First, she wants Emmett’s body returned to Chicago. Then she wants justice for his murder. She’ll only gradually come to see she needs to work on something bigger.
Basically, this is Deadwyler’s movie, and all I really want to say about her is if she somehow does not get a Best Actress nomination for this role, I will be incredibly surprised. She nails this role, slipping back and forth between worried to grieving to determined as needed. There’s a scene where, seeing her son’s body, she slips from deep sorrow to something like righteous determination. I can’t say that I am at all familiar with her or her work, but she really impressed me here. Likewise, Hall made a real impression as young Emmett, especially considering how little screentime he got due to the nature of the story.
I won’t say the movie is flawless. The score is a bit over-the-top, and there are moments when characters come in and tell their stories. The stories are important, and they didn’t bother me while I was watching the movie, and the score’s on-the-nose nature didn’t hit me too hard at the time, but it’s still something that happened in the movie. But mostly, this is just an important story told well by talented filmmakers. It made the movie not about the violence of Emmett’s death–indeed, the violence isn’t shown onscreen–but how a human being, not even an adult, was treated as less than human, and then posthumously blamed for his own death and denied justice. Indeed, closing narration at the end of the movie shows just how long it took for something that was blatantly an act of evil to be declared illegal in the United States. Mamie and Emmett’s story needs to be told, and it needs to be told in a manner that highlights what was done to an innocent boy. Till accomplishes all that in a sometimes appropriately devastating manner, but ultimately in a way that reminds viewers of the human cost of a real tragedy.
On a final note, I’m not exactly familiar with what went down in the murder trial. It’s outcome didn’t surprise me in the slightest, but the white sheriff’s testimony, if historically accurate, was a good example of how things that might seem to me to be new ways to be horrible are probably a lot older than I realized.
Grade: A
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