At first, it’s a little jarring when the year 1987 appears over the first shots of Just Mercy, an account of Walter McMillian’s (Jamie Foxx) wrongful murder conviction and sentencing to death. Destin Daniel Cretton’s depiction of a white police force’s animosity toward the Alabama man, seen driving home from his job as a wood pulper and being stopped by a blockade of heavily armed cops, suggests something out of a film about the distant past. But as Walter is swiftly tried and found guilty of the murder of a white woman from the very town, Monroeville, where Harper Lee lived and wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, it’s clear that little changed in the backwoods of the Deep South since the Jim Crow era.
This point is quickly and succinctly made, yet Cretton proceeds to underline it upon pivoting to Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), a young man fresh out of Harvard Law School who moves to Alabama to commit himself to helping death row inmates denied a shot at a fair trial by incompetent, disinterested public defenders and biased judges. Bryan, operating with a federal grant, decides to open a practice specifically to help these prisoners, an idea that finds so little traction in the South that even property owners refuse to lease space to him. And in terms of employees, only Eva Ansley (Brie Larson) has the courage to apply for such a job.
What follows is paint-by-numbers legal drama about race and justice, replete with familiar scenes depicting police intimidating suspects and attorneys alike, the hard stares of racist whites, and the knowing resignation of blacks who barely have the heart to tell a do-gooder lawyer how naïve he’s being. There are even scenes in which Ansley is tasked to be a kind of Socratic voice of the baffled white conscience, as when she reviews what Bryan has uncovered about Walter’s conviction and asks him repeatedly to confirm that the white police railroaded a black man in the South. In a time when awareness and acknowledgement of racial bias and extrajudicial measures by law enforcement in America is at its most widespread, such scenes feel condescendingly pitched to an unconverted audience of the imagination.
When Bryan finally stumbles across Walter’s case, he ardently devotes himself to clearing the man’s name, growing close to him and his wife, Minnie (Karan Kendrick), and their children and discovering more and more inconsistencies in the original criminal trial. Yet with so much attention increasingly devoted to individuals marshaling facts in order to reverse a case where the evidence is so provably absurd at first glance, too little time is spent animating the characters themselves. Walter is depicted as an almost saintly being, watching over cellmates and offering encouragement even when he has none for himself, while Bryan’s steadfastness in the face of so much trickery on the part of Alabama’s legal system never falters.
The simplicity with which Walter and Bryan are characterized as heroes is underscored in scenes where Bryan interviews the state’s one witness against Walter, Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson), a white convicted murderer. The man enters the film with a jagged energy, with a burn scar that tugs one side of his face into an eternal grimace and a loping gait that makes him seem like a marionette. In conversations with Bryan, the convict proves at once canny and vulnerable, wracked with guilt over his role in condemning a man under coercion while shrewdly avoiding further implicating himself. Foxx plays Walter like a man defeated by the state, but Nelson imbues Myers with the twitchy fear of a man who knows the powers that be can always find new ways to torment those who they consider expendable.
As flat as Byran may be on the page, though, Jordan regularly elevates the character. Indeed, if nothing else, Just Mercy offers further proof that Jordan, in addition to being an extraordinary actor, is also a true movie star in an era that desperately lacks them. Bryan is rendered as a two-dimensional crusader by Cretton and co-screenwriter Andrew Lanham, but every close-up of Jordan brims with an energy that communicates Bryan’s outrage and conviction, as well as the despair of a man who thought he knew what to expect when he took this job but discovered things were so much worse than he could have imagined. In some shots, Jordan quivers in ways that get at Bryan’s internal war to remain calm, giving the attorney’s overriding professionalism an added dimension by showing the effort to maintain it. The film around Jordan plays like a lesson on justice being taught by self-aware actors, but he lives Bryan’s pain, imbuing Just Mercy with a forcefulness that overpowers the its sermonizing.
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