Just Mercy
Destin Daniel Cretton (2019)
Based on the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson’s memoir of the same name, Just Mercy is often pedestrian and pious. Thanks to its subject matter – racial discrimination and injustice in Alabama, in the late 1980s and early 1990s – it’s also often gripping and enraging. Stevenson, an African-American born in rural Delaware in 1959, won a scholarship to Harvard Law School and graduated in 1985. Four years later, he was appointed to run the Alabama operation of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a death-penalty defence organisation. When the US Congress discontinued funding for death-penalty defence, Stevenson converted the center into the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit organisation based in Montgomery.
One of his first cases in Alabama was appealing the murder conviction of Walter McMillian, a middle-aged black timber worker from Monroeville. McMillian was convicted in 1988 for the killing of a white teenager, Ronda Morrison, at the dry cleaners where she worked. In imposing the death penalty on McMillian, the trial judge overruled the jury’s recommendation of a life sentence. The chief prosecution witness was Ralph Myers, a convicted felon, who admitted to Stevenson that his testimony incriminating McMillian was false and the result of police pressure. The Alabama court concerned turned down four appeals before ruling, in March 1993, to reverse McMillian’s conviction and grant him a new trial. Stevenson pressed successfully for all charges to be dropped without the case going to retrial.
Since then, some dozens of prisoners have been saved from the death penalty with the help of Bryan Stevenson but it’s understandable that Just Mercy, which Destin Daniel Cretton wrote with Andrew Lanham, concerns itself almost exclusively with a single case – Walter McMillian’s. The key events in the case (according to the Wikipedia description of it) are also simplified and streamlined – without being seriously distorted – for the sake of dramatic licence. Cretton and Lanham are no less single-minded in deciding to concentrate entirely on Stevenson’s work. They make this virtually explicit when one of his colleagues asks another if he’s married and is told ‘to his work’. Just before Stevenson (Michael B Jordan) goes to Alabama, he visits his mother[1], who warns him, ‘What you’re doing is going to make a lot of people upset’. In a conversation with McMillian (Jamie Foxx), Stevenson talks briefly of his upbringing and assures the prisoner that ‘I know what it’s like to be in the shadows’. That’s about as much as Just Mercy shows of the hero’s personal life.
It’s not a good decision, for two reasons. First, it’s frustrating that a good actor like Michael B Jordan is denied the scope for creating a larger portrait of the man he’s playing. (I haven’t read Stevenson’s memoir but it’s hard to believe that it’s as emotionally reticent as this screen account of him.) Second, it exposes Just Mercy more baldly as a polemic and, at times, a sermon. One of Bryan Stevenson’s best-known quotes is, ‘Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done’. That’s not something you’d infer from the film’s treatment of significant white characters, other than Stevenson’s loyal, tireless co-worker Eva Ansley (Brie Larson) and, when he eventually tells the truth in court, Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson).
This is fair enough. The sheriff (Michael Harding) who originally arrests McMillian, the Monroe County DA Thomas Chapman (Rafe Spall) and the appeal court judge (Lindsay Ayliffe) are representatives of a pernicious system and mindset. We see them in the act of committing among (it’s to be hoped) the worst things they’ve ever done. What can only be called the film’s morally black-and-white approach is seen to greater disadvantage in the African-American characters. Except for Stevenson and McMillian, the blacks in Just Mercy are decent and/or wronged, and that’s all they are. This applies to McMillian’s family, headed by his wife (Karan Kendrick) and eldest son (C J LeBlanc). It also applies, more strikingly and without meaningful exception, to his fellow prisoners on Alabama’s death row.
When Stevenson first visits Chapman’s office, both his secretary and the DA himself recommend a visit to the local Mockingbird Museum. Maycomb County in Harper Lee’s novel is a fictional name for Monroe County, where the author grew up. The references to the museum are ironic, given the continuing systematised racism of Alabama, sixty years after the Depression era in which To Kill a Mockingbird is set. A second, presumably inadvertent, irony is that the racial characterisations in Just Mercy, sixty years after Robert Mulligan’s screen version of Harper Lee’s novel, haven’t advanced either.
The simplistic screenplay also means that, on the rare occasions when a character has a change of heart, the change occurs immediately and obviously. In their opening interview, McMillian cynically and angrily dismisses the possibility of Stevenson being able to empathise with, let alone help, him. The next time Stevenson visits, after going to see his family, McMillian is a changed man: ‘I can’t believe you talked to all my people, said you’re going to fight for me’. When Stevenson first comes to death row, a young prison guard (Hayes Mercure) insists on strip-searching the lawyer, in order to humiliate him. After the guard has experienced the shock of witnessing an execution, he switches from nasty to mutely sheepish.
The acting in Just Mercy, though often strong, isn’t well orchestrated. Michael B Jordan’s resistance to grandstanding is admirable. He’s keen to honour Bryan Stevenson by delivering his words with the minimum of histrionics and intrusive character detail. Thanks to Jordan’s natural charisma, this works well enough – though less well in the courtroom scenes. Stevenson is evidently a highly effective defence lawyer; that must entail an element of performance in court that Jordan seems reluctant to allow. Brie Larson, the star of each of Destin Daniel Cretton’s last two features, has come a long way in terms of public profile since the first of those (Short Term 12). She has a supporting role this time, and is also playing a real-life hero. This combination of factors probably explains why Larson follows Jordan’s lead in underplaying. The modesty of her approach is, like his, commendable but the result is too downbeat and opaque. Since much of their dialogue is weakly cliched, the self-discipline that Jordan and Larson show in de-dramatising their lines amounts to wasted effort.
In contrast, Cretton has encouraged the death row inmates and a couple of others to act their socks off. In the case of Jamie Foxx, this pays dividends. Even in the scene describing Walter McMillian’s abrupt switch to welcoming Stevenson’s help, Foxx combines gratitude with suggestions of McMillian’s guilty conscience towards his wife and family. Where the role is smaller and more concentrated, the playing can seem OTT. Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan) is a PTSD-afflicted military veteran and long-serving prisoner on death row. Richardson admits to the murder for which he’s been convicted but it was mental illness that drove him to kill. Rob Morgan shakes and stammers to make this clear. Tim Blake Nelson’s overacting tendencies are more conspicuous than ever in his interpretation of the variously damaged Ralph Myers. Rafe Spall twitches and averts his eyes so frantically that psychological instability looks to be the morally benighted DA’s basic problem too.
Destin Daniel Cretton does, however, keep one minor character as an emotional ace up his sleeve. One of the other death row inmates is played by the heavy-set O’Shea Jackson Jr. He’s so naturally engaging and expressive (he made a very good impression in Ingrid Goes West a couple of years back) that you want to know more about his character here than Cretton is prepared to give you. The film ends, as might be expected, with photographs of the actual people concerned and titles that summarise their afterlife. O’Shea Jackson Jr’s character is revealed to be Anthony Ray Hinton, convicted of the murders of two fast-food restaurant managers in 1985. Walter McMillian spent more than four years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Hinton spent twenty-eight years in the same place. In 2015, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction on appeal, and the state dropped all charges against him.
As a piece of drama, Just Mercy is no great shakes. In the early stages, the tempo is leisurely and the storytelling almost desultory. The focus on the McMillian case and on Stevenson’s actions at the expense of his reactions is repeatedly vexing. EJI seems to start life in the back room of Eva Ansley’s home. By the business end of the film, she and Stevenson work in a purpose-built office with several other staff but it’s not clear how the operation has been able to expand, or how Stevenson and Ansley have made this happen. Cretton keeps on pushing his message too to the very last of the closing titles. This tells us that, since 1976, for every nine Americans executed by the state, one is exonerated and released from death row. The statistic speaks for itself: Cretton doesn’t need to editorialise by adding that this is an appalling rate of error.
Yet the film is moving – especially in Jamie Foxx’s reaction in court, when Walter McMillian is exonerated – and involving in ways that last year’s other death row drama Clemency never is. There’s a strong argument for saying that Just Mercy would have been better as a screen documentary. There’s an irresistible argument for insisting that it had to be dramatised, with high-profile names in the cast, in order for the work of Bryan Stevenson, and the outrageous legal corruption that he’s spent decades trying to break down, to get the publicity they demand.
28 January 2020
[1] Uncredited on IMDb, as far as I can see – along with the woman playing the district attorney’s secretary, who is mentioned later in this note.