“JUST MERCY”: Truth to power

Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx

Published January 8, 2020 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene

“JUST MERCY”  My rating: C+ (Opens wide on Jan. 10)

136 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

In “Just Mercy” an A-list cast does its best with movie-of-the-week execution; the results are simultaneously inspiring and off-putting.

Destin Daniel Cretton’s film is based on the true story of attorney Bryan Stevenson and the founding in Alabama in the late 1980s of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization devoted to re-examining the cases of Death Row inmates.  These were condemned men  — most of them black — whose convictions may have been based on perjured testimony, suppressed evidence and inadequate defenses.

In addition to its truth-to-power narrative and the obvious dramatic power of men awaiting death at the hands of the state, the film boasts a lead performance by Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson, a New Englander who came to the South to right wrongs.

Oscar winner Brie Larsen takes a supporting role as the local activist who becomes his assistant and guide to the workings of Southern justice.

Brie Larsen

And Jamie Foxx, another Oscar winner, appears  as one of their first clients, Walter McMillian, convicted of murdering a white teenage girl despite a complete lack of physical evidence and assertions by friends and family that he was elsewhere at the time of the murder.

His conviction was based entirely on the testimony of small-time crook Ralph Myers, who claimed that McMillian had kidnapped him and forced him to drive the pair to the scene of the crime.  Myers’ remembrances were shot through with inconsistencies; no matter, the prosecution wanted the case closed.

Cretton’s screenplay chronicles the slow process of examining the evidence in the face of cops and prosecutors who resent this Yankee interloper. Even the men awaiting execution are dubious;  McMillan initially rejects Stevenson’s help as too little too late.

We get Big House drama as one inmate, a veteran with PTSD (Rob Morgan), nears his execution date. And Stevenson undergoes persecutions of his own, from being stripped searched before seeing his clients to outright threats by local police.

Tim Blake Nelson

This is an important story.  But it’s undermined by iffy writing and directing. Big chunks of Cretton’s dialogue is wince-inducing…it’s almost like a white writer’s deaf attempt to capture the “authentic” talk of poor black folk.

Moreover, the yarn concentrates so completely on legal maneuvering and moral outrage that there’s little room for personal drama.  Jordan, one of our finest young actors, is actually pretty bland here.  So are Larsen and Foxx.

In fact the movie only really grabs out attention with the arrival of Tim Blake Nelson playing Ralph Myers, the lowlife whose testimony sent McMillian to Death Row. Nelson pretty much steals every scene as a jailhouse jerk who literally talks out of the side of  his mouth and milks Stevenson for treats from the visitors’ room vending machines.  Yeah, it’s hammy as all get-out, but it injects some badly needed energy into the proceedings.

| Robert W. Butler