At the end of its second act, Just Mercy sends one of its secondary characters to the electric chair, in the most gruelling and devastating scene of its kind since The Green Mile. It’s a long build, director Destin Daniel Cretton, forcing his audience to confront the reality of this situation, allows the tension to simmer; you wait with baited breath for it to cut away… and it never does. All the while, we look upon both the terrified inmate and our hero, sitting in the audience behind glass, and I couldn’t help being reminded of the history of public executions, the practice of communing to watch someone die. No longer are they public, but they still draw a crowd.
As unnerving as it is, this proves to be the most vital moment of Just Mercy, the true life story of attorney Bryan Stevenson’s (Michael B. Jordan) efforts to acquit death row inmate Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx) of a blatantly false murder charge in 1990s Alabama. It emphasizes exactly what is being fought for and why fighting for it matters. Because the executed mans’ crime carried a context undeserving of that fate, and the primary victim of the piece committed no crime at all.
Simultaneously the most frustrating yet least shocking element of the narrative is how easy it was for McMillian to be sentenced to death row for a crime even someone without a law degree could tell he didn’t commit, and the immense efforts of the local government, law enforcement, and citizenry to obstruct any attempts to prove it and set him free. It’s meant to infuriate of course, backed up by the films’ obligatory postscript which points out how many innocent people (and especially African-Americans) have been given these severe sentences on trumped up charges. A lot of movies that deal with racial injustice in the American south employ such conventions of focusing on explicit actions of bigotry - a white prison guard feigning the necessity of a strip search to a black visitor purely to humiliate him, a deliberate obtuseness on the part of the avatars of institutionalized white supremacy, a bomb threat -to win the audiences’ favour easily and assuage their self-reflection by rendering the villains reprehensible to the point of caricature (Green Book certainly did). Just Mercy is guilty of this as well, most notably in an interaction Stevenson has with police officers and a typecast Rafe Spall playing yet another asshole authority figure; and it does play out relatively typical of this kind of dramatization of a real inspiring story. But it spends the bulk of its time either embroiled in the legal process, an education tool as much as necessary plot progression, or entrenched in character development. The film isn’t interested in determining the real killer of nineteen year old Ronda Morrison, only in legally clearing McMillian of the offense, and therefore showcasing how the system is stacked against him …and how it can be exposed and beaten.
One of the most consistently watchable elements of Just Mercy is Jordans’ dedicated performance, as he continues to prove himself one of the best actors of his generation. What might have been another bland white knight from the north in the hands of a lesser actor, Jordan brings out a resonant humanity and compassion to his character. Foxx is also very good, conveying aptly the weight of a man having almost fully resigned himself to hopelessness in his four year incarceration, only to have those feelings challenged multiple times throughout the film –supported by adequate turns from fellow inmates played by Rob Morgan and O’Shea Jackson Jr. Cretton reunites once again with Brie Larson, who rose to fame through his Short Term 12 –though in a smaller, less interesting role than in that film or their follow-up collaboration The Glass Castle. And Tim Blake Nelson who, like Spall, is typecast as another redneck doofus, actually gets to subvert a couple tropes of his walking stereotype in this film, as dull as he may be otherwise.
The film is very strong in its convictions and its’ unwavering abhorrence of capital punishment, even if it fails to discuss much the nuances of such an issue. That side of the story and of Stevensons’ work often gets lost in the triumphing-over-racial-oppression narrative that is the greater driving force of the movie, directly significant only a handful of times after Stevenson takes on McMillians’ defence. As powerful and important as that execution scene is, the stakes it represents would be easy to lose sight of in its absence, given how much of the films’ momentum and themes could apply just as easily to any number of cases of African-Americans disproportionately incarcerated in the United States –which is still a noble cause of course and worthy of awareness being raised to it through film. But the choice Cretton made here takes a different and potentially enlightening area of focus and mostly drowns it out in a more normative angle.
This doesn’t affect the movies’ aims though. Monroeville, where much of it is set, happens to be the hometown of Harper Lee, a fact repeatedly emphasized by its townsfolk in this film, unable to see the irony in their venomous, obstructive responses to a veritable Atticus Finch defending an obvious Tom Robinson. Where elsewhere acts of racism felt accentuated for drama, this kind of ignorance rings depressingly authentic to how often people will rally around an icon while neglecting its ideals. Just Mercy proudly flaunts its respect for those ideals, it wants you to be angry they’re not upheld. It works well enough, though thinking back to that execution scene, it could have soared.
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