Danielle Deadwyler is astonishing in this harrowing drama based on the aftermath of the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. As Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of the murdered boy, she is the dignified anchor which holds together an unfocussed and overstuffed, but undeniably forceful and moving film on one of the seminal moments of the civil rights movement. Chinonye Chukwu‘s (Clemency) bold depiction of the events broils with a fury that lays to rest any concerns of a dull-but-worthy affair, yet demonstrates that tact and restraint can be just as persuasive.
After the body of her son Emmett is found three days after he was snatched from his uncle’s home in Mississippi and murdered, his mother Mamie has his corpse flown back to their home of Chicago. Despite the appalling mutilation Emmett suffered and the bloating and decomposition from the water and high temperatures, Mamie insists that the funeral be an open casket. The resulting public outrage leads to Emmett’s killers put on trial in Mississippi; an unprecedented event in a state very much governed by Jim Crow laws.
Though the reporting of the case was sensational – and Mamie’s organisation of the funeral was a big a big part of that – Chukwu’s depiction of the death and the days after are handled with delicacy and sensitivity. The violence that was inflicted on the boy isn’t shown, and when the dramatically vital moment to show his mangled body comes, the camera of cinematographer Bobby Bukowski moves in gradually, as if it can barely bring itself to look. Every effort is taken to ensure its impact as a moment of intense sorrow, not shock. It’s tender and awful and wonderfully done.
It has to be said though that a lot of the storytelling fails to match the grace of that astonishing scene. Though positing Mamie as the central figure, the film takes pains to establish Emmett as a character (played with a heartbreaking, doomed vitality by Jalyn Hall). It’s absolutely necessary to do so as the film thrums with tension between personal pain and political galvanisation, yet the main narrative doesn’t really begin until Mamie is told of his death. Added to moments where Till becomes variously a courtroom drama, character study, and something approaching a political thriller (the depiction of the NAACP, with its incredibly astute grasp of media as a dissemination tool would be worth a movie in its own right), it suffers from too few moments where it can slow down enough to breathe.
Yet those moments do occur and they’re among the strongest, even if they spell out the themes in neon letters within their dialogue. In one scene, Jayme Lawson movingly voices concerns about the very real personal danger that the movement brings as Myrlie Evers, wife of NAACP field secretary Medgar. And John Douglas Thompson practically tears his soul from his body as Emmett’s uncle Moses, who explains to Mamie how he had to make the calculated choice to let the murderers drag the boy from his home; to spare his own sons and to avoid further reprisals from, “Every white man who’d rather see a Negro dead than breathing the same air as him.” A personal sacrifice in service of the bigger picture. In its own way, it’s as emotionally gruelling as any depiction of Emmett’s ruined remains.
“My son is not a case!” Mamie says, just after her son’s disappearance. She’s correct, just not perhaps in the way she believes. Like Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. in the years after his lynching, and George Floyd and Mahsa Amini recently, what Emmett Till became is a symbol. A symbol of resistance, and of a movement much more seismic than his own murder, obscene enough as that was.
Chinonye Chukwu’s narrative may wrestle futilely with itself between establishing Emmett the boy with his values and flaws and dreams he never got a chance to fulfil, and Emmett the unwitting martyr and catalyst for the simmering civil rights movement. The internal irony of the difficulty in finding the essential humanity of the boy behind the legacy, when our knowledge of him comes solely as a result of the actions of those who denied him that humanity is part of the film’s oxymoronic resonance. It’s alternatingly delicate and thunderously portentous, clear-eyed and sentimental, yet it managed to never to pull itself apart with these contradictions. Despite its flaws, it’s a powerful work indeed, thanks in no small part to that performance by Danielle Deadwyler.
In cinemas nationwide now