Just Mercy: Just good enough to relate a powerful story about race-based Southern justice
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-
The movie Just Mercy was apparently kick-started by a piece on CBS’s 60 Minutes about Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, which has freed some 140 wrongly-convicted people from Death Row.
That piece told a compelling story about lost lives, both literally and figuratively, that left the viewer in tears.
Michael B. Jordan plays a lawyer fighting to spring a Death Row inmate (Jamie Foxx) in Just Mercy.
Just Mercy - which stars Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as Stevenson’s first client Walter McMillian - also tells a compelling story that leaves audiences in tears.
Read our interview with Bryan Stevenson
To this extent, it underuses its wider latitude and bigger screen, expanding a 20-minute TV segment into a nearly two-and-a-half-hour movie, telling the same story without using the opportunity to dig more deeply into its characters.
(Someday, they should do a tally of films inspired by 60 Minutes pieces, including the Oscar-nominated The Insider, which was about 60 Minutes itself).
Taken from Stevenson’s autobiography of the same name, Just Mercy introduces us to Stevenson as a freshly-graduated Harvard Law School grad, who has his pick of lucrative jobs, but decides to head South to represent the poor and disenfranchised. Raised on the poor side of the tracks in Delaware, we’re told he is from similar circumstances to his clients, where Blacks make up a disproportional percentage of the accused, convicted and imprisoned. Still Alabama is Alabama, and Stevenson’s mom is convinced he’s going to get killed down there.
The nascent, barely-staffed office he joins, is run by a manager played by Brie Larson, who can barely cough up rent, let alone guarantee she can pay Stevenson. And his first assignment is in Monroeville, Ala., the home of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee. And don’t think the writers let that bit of irony go by. Nearly every otherwise-uncooperative white person Stevenson meets cheerfully recommends he visit the Harper Lee Museum while in town.
That fake friendliness flies out the window with Stevenson’s first visit to McMillian in jail. McMillian, played with grim, slumped resignation by Foxx, was convicted of murdering an 18-year-old white woman who worked at a dry-cleaners, even though six black witnesses placed him at a fish fry (three whites testified otherwise, though one would later recant).
Upon arriving at the prison, Stevenson is strip-searched, a “policy” that is understood not to extend to white lawyers. His reined-in anger is the first indication that this is not going to be a courtroom movie with a lot of shouting. As per the actual character’s direction, Jordan plays a lawyer who understands that if he “loses it,” his client loses.
To this extent, director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12, The Glass Castle) avoids made up melodrama in a movie that certainly doesn’t need it (when McMillian’s son is targeted by police for his part in an appeal, the inmate doesn’t need to rage to communicate rage). The viewer is simply shown, along with Stevenson, that even when the facts dictate otherwise, the legal system in an erstwhile Jim Crow state will double down rather than admit its malfeasance.
Still, the viewer ends up learning more about McMillian than it does about Stevenson. What really led him to make this profoundly altruistic career choice? And there are two white characters who are key to the story (played by Rafe Spall and Tim Blake Nelson) who simply, suddenly, decide to do the right thing. These are real people with real motivations and apparent come-to-Jesus moments, which we never get to know.
Still, if Just Mercy doesn’t aim high as a film, it tells its story effectively, and the story itself is powerful enough to overcome the movie’s shortcomings.
Just Mercy. Written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. Starring Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson. Opens wide Friday, January 10.