Chinonye Chukwu’s 2019 film Clemency is intensely keyed to the interiority of its main character, a warden at a men’s prison. Throughout, much space is given to Alfre Woodard, in a profoundly observant performance built with minimal dialogue, to convey her character’s feelings of guilt and betrayal. That film’s approach is a seemingly simple yet novel means of eliding the blunt moralizing that plagues most social issue films.
Chukwu takes a similar approach in Till, which, at its most striking, focuses on the face of its star, Danielle Deadwyler, as Mamie Till-Mobley. For much of the film, the director’s more subtle, graceful impulses help to tamper, though never completely extinguish, the schmaltzy flourishes and narrative clichés that frequently weigh down modern Hollywood biopics.
Unfortunately, this quality isn’t exactly evident in the film’s shaky first act, where the genre’s tropes are most conspicuous. Syrupy strings, broad performances, and excessive foreshadowing are the order of the day as Mamie readies her son, 14-year-old Emmett (Jalyn Hall), for his first trip to Mississippi to visit family for a couple of weeks. Emmett Till’s fate is widely known—that he was lynched after allegedly whisting at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett)—and the opening act lays on thick how vibrant and promising he was and how deeply his mother adored him, as if to make the inevitable blow of his loss sting that much more.
It’s an understandable tactic to steer our sympathies toward Emmett early on, but Chukwu leans so heavily into sentimentality here, and repeatedly telegraphs Mamie’s lingering fears for her son’s safety, that Till feels like your run-of-the-mill period biopic. But from the moment Emmett is kidnapped, the film shifts gears and takes a more meditative path. For one, Emmett’s torture and murder occur off screen, only referenced in an extreme wide shot of the barn where he was taken, and from where we briefly hear his distant screams for mercy. It’s a notably reserved approach, especially given what came before, and it shows the kind of restraint Chukwu will continue to bring to heavy material that could easily have been exploitative or didactic.
Throughout, Till homes in on Mamie’s grief, tracing it as it’s channeled into her activism, while Emmett’s killers, the despicable Carolyn, and even the racist judge, jury, and lawyers are all thrust to the background. After seeing Emmett’s corpse, which was so badly beaten and shot up that the boy was hard to identify, Mamie decides to hold an open-casket funeral and use the press to show the world what was done to him. The film shows us his mutilated face, but more importantly it shows us Mamie’s as she carefully examines Emmett’s corpse, caressing his arms, legs, and face as if trying to identify him as much through touch as by sight.
The filmmakers purposefully keep their focus on the incalculable trauma of Emmett’s murder to Black people, rather than trying to earn easy points with takedowns of the callousness and brutality of blatantly racist murderers. Even in the trial scenes, Chukwu minimizes the presence of white people, keeping them primarily off screen or out of focus, while leaving the camera trained on Mamie’s face to allow us to read her emotional ebbs and flows. Till shows welcome respect for viewers by not spoon-feeding or patronizing them as it fixates on Mamie’s processing of her loss and her unwavering pursuit of justice and social change.
Because of Chukwu’s willingness to let small-scale, granular scenes play out unhurried and at length, Till taps into a deeper well of emotions than most biopics, which mostly proceed as a bland regurgitation of life events. In one scene, Mamie’s mother (Whoopi Goldberg) slowly breaks down in bed, eventually repeating the fact that she told Emmett to go to Mississippi, and in a later scene, Emmett’s Uncle Moses (John Douglas Thompson) confronts his guilt at not using his shotgun to protect the boy when he was kidnapped. In both cases, the character’s breakdowns are gradual and Mamie’s measured silence speaks volumes about her own conflicted feelings toward her family members as well as her inability to communicate her bereavement in any way other than through her search for justice.
Such subtle and conflicting emotions are left up for interpretation, and Till refuses easy catharsis through any sort of clear resolution or Mamie forgiving her relatives for their mistakes. When the woman gives her final speech about the tiresome quest for equality, the maudlin orchestral music swells so loudly that it almost drowns out her words. It’s a jarring scene that marks the return of the undiluted sentimentality that dominates the film’s first half, but it’s also somewhat fitting for a work that says so much more without words than it does with them.
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