The latest Black movie that caters (mostly) to a white audience, Just Mercy nonetheless manages to get several things very, very right. Dramatizing the true story of a wrongfully convicted black man, the film follows a young defense attorney and civil rights activist in his efforts to see justice carried out. While the film nominally fights police corruption, institutionalized racism in the criminal justice system, and the death penalty, it reigns in its righteous anger to keep the whole affair consistently and specifically about this case. The result, for better or worse, is a relatively straightforward courtroom drama with a lot on its mind and even more on its heart, though it leaves those matters largely implicit.
We begin with Walter "Johnny D" McMillian (Jamie Foxx), a black man in Alabama making his way home from work when he is suddenly stopped by an entire squad of police officers who arrest him on the spot. Then we're introduced to a parallel story of the man soon to partner with him: Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), a recent Harvard law graduate with pep still in his step as he travels to Alabama to change the world. Bryan treats his own culture shock from landing, suddenly, in Alabama and with inmates on death row by diving headfirst into his job at the Equal Justice Initiative. Having recently founded this organization with Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), he meets the inmates he will be defending from the death penalty: those poor souls, he repeats, who are most in need of quality help.
One of these men is indeed Johnny D and we learn his story along with Bryan, from court documents to eyewitness accounts. Johnny D, it is immediately apparent, is totally innocent of the murder he was convicted of perpetrating. He was framed by desperation -- corrupt police and ravenous media -- and coerced into delivering false testimony in exchange for a lighter sentence in his own pending trial, namely getting off death row. But, absurd as the whole ordeal may be, Johnny D's life hangs in the balance, and Bryan's work is more than cut out for him. People are too afraid to help him or too indifferent to care. And while indifference is a difficult villain to film, it nevertheless makes for a fascinating example here.
Director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12, The Glass Castle, and the upcoming MCU feature Shang-Chi) is very careful here -- again, for better or worse -- at keeping the film very civil. Some will see this as watered-down and immaterial, if not downright insulting, much like the Green Book that won Best Picture at the Oscars last year. This movie staunchly refuses to allow its Black rage to boil, as it righteously should, instead apparently hoping to make it all accessible to moderate whites and even shallow racists. But there's nothing worthy or worthwhile in seeing cartoonish racist villains (specifically the sheriff and prosecuting attorney) only out to save their own hides. The film would have been better served to show these individuals as the agents of corrupt and violent institutions that are still entrenched today.
I wanted more dynamism from the plot, but the characters here are also woefully flat. The only interesting characters come from a PTSD-afflicted inmate (a tragic Rob Morgan) who is executed halfway through the movie, and the convict who lied under pressure to save his own skin (the always reliable Tim Blake Nelson). These characters demonstrate that even poor or sick people are victimized by law enforcement; injustice is, it could be argued, rather colorblind. Brie Larson and Jamie Foxx milk their slim and shallow roles for every second of screen time, along with Michael B. Jordan who only succeeds slightly more due to his physicality and burning intensity. If there is Black rage in this movie, it's in his eyes and gritted teeth in horrific if understated moments of unabashed racism.
No comments:
Post a Comment