2022 was shockingly a year of renewed reckoning with the murder of Emmett Till. First in the media space was an ABC miniseries called Women of the Movement released in January right as both mother and son were posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. In March, the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act was signed into law in the United States, the culmination of over sixty years of campaigning (and which soberly still did not have unanimous support in either congressional house). In June an unserved arrest warrant for Till’s accuser Carolyn Bryant dated August 29th 1955, the day after the murder, was discovered in a Mississippi courthouse basement. Barely a month later an unpublished memoir by Bryant was leaked publicly, a work of historical revisionism that shows little remorse and no acknowledgement of her own role in the lynching. Renewed calls for her arrest followed this to no avail -a cruel reminder that none of the guilty ever suffered consequences for their hate crime. And after all of this had passed, in October came the big prestige movie on the subject: Till, bookending the year as another dramatization of the events and aftermath.
All of this context serves to show that the wounds from this crucial episode of Civil Rights history are still deep and real, whether that recognition comes in progress or continued ignorance. And this may be small next to the moments I referenced, but Till fits the pattern in that it is an achievement decades in the making of bringing this story to the big screen, only for it to be conspicuously locked out by the awards organization that bestows import and credibility within the American film industry. When it comes to this particular American tragedy it always seems to be a mix of steps forward and back.
Till is not one of my favourite movies of the year but its absence in the Oscar race is a touch suspicious given how friendly it is on multiple fronts towards Academy sensibilities while still being fairly good in spite of that. It’s highly reminiscent of Selma in that regard and appears to be a victim of Academy membership’s remaining problematic blind spot towards black movies, even those that play by their apparent rules. Certainly the snub of Danielle Deadwyler is notable, who as Mamie Till is the single driving fire of the movie and an astonishing breakout for an actress who only recently migrated to film from the stage.
Filtered largely through her point of view the movie approaches the tragedy as less an episode and more of a moment -an inciting incident for several decades’ worth of activism and revolution that continues to this day off the back of Mamie’s choices to expose the conditions of her son’s death to the world. Understanding the purpose of that, the movie doesn’t hold back either, playing on a real atmosphere of dread from the moment Emmett (Jalyn Hall) leaves for Mississippi and not letting up through the altercation at the grocery store and subsequent abduction (the movie only shows restraint around the death itself, which occurs off-screen). The narrative construction is designed in a way that is harrowingly arresting for both those who know the story and don’t. And it culminates at the famously open-casket funeral with Emmett’s mangled face on full display.
The director of this movie is Chinonye Chukwu, who dealt with similar harsh themes and imagery in her stupendous 2019 film Clemency -likewise carried on the back of a strong black woman’s performance. Several times through the first half of this movie Chukwu hints that she might back away from the immediacy of the subject matter, before instead plunging into it with a tenacity that renders its effect all the more bold. She is not afraid of the darkness to the story, she knows its power, and engages in some of the difficult conversations around it. When Mamie goes down to Mississippi for the trial she has a very hard confrontation with her brother Moses (John Douglas Thompson) who was there when the assailants abducted Emmett and didn’t put up much of a fight –knowing the dangers it posed to himself and his own children. There is an unquenchable frustration there, but understanding too, and Chukwu and her actors know how to rightly toe that line.
And of those actors, none more so than Deadwyler, who understood the assignment thoroughly. She plays Mamie with a subtle trepidation, though an ordinary maternal disposition until the incident occurs, when it spills over into a powerful grief. But she conveys it as a grief without vulnerability, summoning immense force of will to make a point with larger ramifications. Deadwyler and the script seem to position the death as an awakening for Mamie –bringing a great strength to her out of the most horrific of circumstances. The pain cascades into passionate determination, and yet never is the death excused for this, never downplayed or abstracted. For as world-shaking as it is, the film doesn’t lose sight of the human element -what Emmett Till’s death meant personally for Mamie and her family. It is a tightrope you might not notice Chukwu and Deadwyler walking, and that is how you know they do so impeccably well.
Anger is the primary theme of the latter trial scenes, in which a court down in Mississippi feigns a show of justice in response to the national outcry. But the verdict famously was decided before the trial even started, and was just a show to prop up a blatantly false narrative. It’s hard not to see such a thing dramatized and immediately think of To Kill a Mockingbird, and Till even in enacting the facts doesn’t try hard to overthrow that association. But for Deadwyler’s performance, especially in the lead-up to her choice to walk out, it is the sequence of the movie that is the least interesting; the racists live up to bland archetype and aside from a couple replications of notable photographs, Chukwu’s directing is muted of character. It’s a vital part of the story, one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in U.S. history, but the movie fails to portray it as more than southern racists just doing their thing. And there is perhaps a cleverness in that -the banality of evil and what-not. But its effect for its authenticity feels removed from history, where everything else is directly in-tune.
Till runs in a formulaic direction plot-wise too, it hasn’t much interest in reinventing the biopic genre as much as just telling its story -which is fair to a degree. Schoolteachers need movies too after all. Where I appreciate the film though is in those moments and choices that highlight an emotional gravity as much as a historical one. From the disquieting mood of Emmett leaving home to Mamie’s fantasy of greeting him in his bedroom long after the murder has occurred, and just about every nuance of Deadwyler’s performance. Watching this movie the tragedy feels not so distant, and that might be the most important thing.
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