Chinonye Chukwu (2022)
I began the 2019 London Film Festival (LFF) by watching Chinonye Chukwu’s debut feature, Clemency. I ended this year’s LFF with Chukwu’s second feature, Till. That this is a stronger film than Clemency is down to what Till is about rather than how it’s been made. Its true story is gripping, thanks to the inherent power of the notorious subject matter, and to (some of) the acting, rather than to Chukwu’s directing choices.
Born and raised in Chicago, Emmett Till was fourteen years old when, in August 1955, he went on holiday to Mississippi to stay with relatives. It was the first time this African-American boy had been separated from his mother and single parent, Mamie, for any length of time. Their relatives in the South lived just outside the little town of Money. During a visit there with his cousins, Emmett entered a grocery store, where he spoke with the young, white, married proprietor, Carolyn Bryant. He allegedly flirted with and wolf whistled at her. A few nights after this, Bryant’s husband and his half-brother abducted the boy from his relatives’ home. Emmett was tortured and shot through the head. His mutilated body, ‘with a 75lb cotton gin fan tied around his neck by way of barbwired fencing’ (Wikipedia), was dumped in the Tallahatchie River, from where it was recovered three days later. When Emmett’s body was returned to Chicago, his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket so that people could see for themselves what Jim Crow racist violence had done to her son. Tens of thousands viewed the casket. Photographs of the mutilated corpse were published in some newspapers and magazines. In September 1955, Roy Bryant and J W Milam stood trial for murder in Sumner, Mississippi and were found not guilty by the all-white jury. The case of Emmett Till was a catalyst for the Civil Rights movement for years after his murder. Chinonye Chukwu’s film recounts these events and commemorates Mamie Till-Mobley (1921-2003), who became a prominent Civil Rights activist in the wake of her son’s death.
This was one of several LFF screenings I attended this year with subtitles for the hard of hearing – helpful for me though the results were sometimes excessively conscientious: we even got ‘fanfare’ during the Universal Pictures intro to Women Talking. I don’t think that happened at the start of Till, though Universal is involved in its distribution too, but description of Abel Korzeniowski’s music came thick and fast on the screen over the next 130 minutes. The music is intense, emotional, pensive, downcast (and downbeat), melancholy, and more. The adjectives serve to underline that, if ever there was a film not needing music to keep cueing its audience what to feel, it’s Till. Chukwu’s overuse of Korzeniowski’s score is typical of her direction and its sometimes counterproductive effects.
The narrative begins shortly before the visit to Mississippi, when Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler) and Emmett (Jalyn Hall), who’s nicknamed ‘Bobo’, drive into central Chicago on a shopping trip. Mamie, who works as a secretary, is assured, well dressed and drives her own car. Her ladylike appearance gives extra nasty impact to the racism of a white floorwalker in a department store, who suggests Mamie might prefer to shop on a different floor (‘downstairs’). She’s furious but composedly declines the invitation; Bobo is excited and oblivious to the exchange. It’s an effective scene; so are parts of the next sequences, in the family home. We’re introduced there to Mamie’s mother, Alma Carthan (Whoopi Goldberg), and Mamie’s fiancé, Gene Mobley (Sean Patrick Thomas). (Mamie had already been married twice, first to Emmett’s late father, then to ‘Pink’ Bradley, whom she divorced after two years.) Also in Chicago, on a visit to his family, is Mamie’s uncle, Moses Wright (John Douglas Thompson), a sharecropper and part-time minister in Mississippi; Bobo will be taking the train South with Uncle Moses and will stay at his house. Mamie’s apprehension about her son’s trip away is understandable but Chukwu works it up into nearly obsessive worry. It’s one example of her tendency to accentuate every element of her important story – with the result that crucial parts of it don’t stand out enough or, through awkward staging, don’t ring true.
This is especially the case with the Mississippi scenes leading up to the murder. In the days before his departure, Mamie has repeatedly told eager, flippant Bobo always to keep on the right side of white folk (‘be small’) and never to get separated from his cousins since they understand local codes of behaviour. The big-city kid soon gets bored in rural Mississippi with nothing much to do except help his kin pick cotton. You can believe Bobo might forget himself enough to wander alone into the Bryant store but Chukwu over-prepares the fateful encounter that took place there. She builds tension between Bobo and Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett) deliberately. By slowing things down and fixing on the woman’s hostile stare, she creates time and reason for the boy to call to mind his mother’s urgent instructions. The wolf whistle, when it finally arrives, is considered. What exactly took place in the grocery has continued to be a matter of dispute but it’s puzzling that Chukwu doesn’t take the opportunity to present it in a way that minimises provocative intention on Emmett’s part. It’s been suggested, for example, that his whistle was a bit of showing off to other boys watching. In Till, he and Carolyn Bryant are pretty well alone in the store.
Roy Bryant (Sean Michael Weber) and Milam (Eric Whitten) arrive with guns late at night at the Wrights’ house and threaten to blast their way in unless ‘Preacher’ opens up. This is a frightening sequence yet there’s little sense of the bewildering terror that Emmett Till must have felt as the intruders hauled him out of bed and drove him off. The audience can only be grateful that Chukwu refrains from showing the assault on Bobo – cries of pain in the darkness are bad enough – but the aftermath to the abduction fails to convey what the Wrights are feeling. Immediately after the grocery store incident, Chukwu makes a big deal of his cousins’ alarm as to what could happen as a consequence of Bobo’s ‘insulting’ Carolyn Bryant. When their worst fears are realised the cousins (Gem Marc Collins and Diallo Thompson) don’t react nearly as much (and Chukwu doesn’t suggest this is because they’re numb with shock). Moses and his wife, Elizabeth (Keisha Tillis), surely are horrified by the thought of what his kidnappers are liable to do to Bobo, and of what on earth they’ll say to Mamie. This doesn’t come through either.
When she receives the terrible news in Chicago, it’s hard even for Mamie to react enough, her alarm about the trip having been so exaggerated. Chukwu is relatively uninterested in dramatising the mother’s protracted nightmare while she knows no more than that her son has disappeared. The lead actress, as well as her character, is in suspense until Mamie learns that Bobo is dead and collapses in grief. For Chukwu, Mamie is a tragic heroine whose ordeal must be shown as a series of visual highlights and outbursts of operatic intensity, and Danielle Deadwyler delivers a performance perfectly aligned to her director’s intentions. Deadwyler (whom I’d not seen before) is beautiful and often compelling: Mamie’s howls of pain at the sight of Bobo’s corpse are an astonishing and dreadful sound (the keening of Keisha Tillis, when Elizabeth confronts the open casket, is similarly impressive). There were times, though, when I wished Deadwyler would stop acting her socks off and find quieter ways of expressing Mamie’s feelings – as Whoopi Goldberg, of all people, succeeds in doing as Alma. Jalyn Hall, too, is excellent as Emmett in the Chicago scenes, as he sings along, word perfect, to songs on the car radio and TV commercial jingles: you miss his exuberant presence when it disappears from the film. But rather than try to capture ‘the godawful hush’ (Sylvia Plath) of his absence, Chukwu prefers to compose shots that aestheticise Mamie’s noble solitude.
Chukwu shows admirable judgment, though, in the challenging sequences where Emmett’s body is seen, by his mother in a mortuary and by others in the casket. The shots of various parts of the hideously bloated, discoloured corpse are shocking but discreet. Chukwu rightly doesn’t make it easy for the viewer by leaving the boy’s appearance to our imagination yet the discretion feels respectful to Emmett‘s memory (and his mother’s). It’s also striking, in this predominantly overemphatic film, that Chukwu’s illustrations of racist attitudes are mostly controlled – and more trenchant as a result. The Chicago store floorwalker at the start succinctly makes the point that in mid-twentieth-century America apartheid thinking wasn’t confined to the South. As Mamie approaches the courthouse in Sumner, she’s terrified by the sound of a gunshot close by; it’s actually the sound of a pop gun, fired by a white boy who chuckles with satisfaction at the effect he’s had. Inside the courthouse, Mamie and her Black companions are on the receiving end of relaxed, automatic contempt and laughter, from court officials and spectators alike. This is both instructive and makes the blood boil more than when actors overact racism. When the judge bangs his gavel, Mamie, hearing an echo of the pop gun, is startled once more.
It’s a pity such details are rare in Till. More characteristically, Chukwu has Mamie, in the Wrights’ home, look at the letter that Bobo wrote her just before he was abducted (and which Uncle Moses insisted the boy should post first thing next morning). Mamie reads and Danielle Deadwyler’s face tells us all we need to know but it’s not enough for Chinonye Chukwe, who cuts to a shot of the letter so that we can start reading too. In Money, Mamie’s car stops outside the Bryant store. The viewer has obviously been there before and realises what seeing the place must mean to her. Chukwu, laying it on with a trowel, has Deadwyler say, ‘So this is where it happened …’ and then deliver a facial reaction. Leading Civil Rights figures take an immediate interest in the case. Mamie’s principal contact in Chicago is Rayfield Mooty (Kevin Carroll); Medgar Evers (Tosin Cole) escorts Mamie and her father (Frankie Faison) to the murder trial in Mississippi. Tosin Cole’s well-judged playing of Medgar Evers is in contrast to the one scene that features Evers’s wife, Myrlie (Jayme Lawson) – a conversation between her and Mamie, in which Myrlie talks of her fears for her husband’s life. Her lines are written so as to describe exactly how he really will meet his end. Medgar Evers was shot dead by a white assassin in June 1963, in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
The screenplay credit is shared by Chinonye Chukwu, Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp, himself a film-maker and best known for his work on and on behalf of Emmett Till. According to Wikipedia, Beauchamp ‘began researching and writing for a documentary about the Till case in the late 1990s. He … worked closely with … Mamie Till-Mobley, who became a friend and mentor of his until her death …’ Beauchamp’s ‘research and advocacy led to the reopening of the Till case in 2004 which was closed again after finding no new evidence’. His documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, was released in 2005, since when Beauchamp has produced a series of documentaries about other ‘cold case’ Civil Rights-related homicides. He is also one of the producers of Till (along with Whoopi Goldberg, his co-writer Michael Reilly, Barbara Broccoli and others). It goes without saying that Keith Beauchamp is deeply invested in this film; that’s no doubt also true of others involved, the director included. I admire and strongly sympathise with their commitment but there’s no point my pretending I think that’s enough to create satisfying film drama.
The very end of Till confirms that the facts of the matter eclipse most of what Chinonye Chukwu has put on the screen. What happened to Medgar Evers is summarised in closing legends, along with plenty more. I already knew about Evers’s assassination but not about much else in these postscripts, which made them all the more appalling. In 1956, Roy Bryant and J W Milam, in a lucrative interview with Look magazine, confessed to the murder: double jeopardy ensured the pair couldn’t be retried and they remained free men for the rest of their lives. Even though Emmett Till’s death gave impetus to a campaign to outlaw lynching, it didn’t become a federal hate crime for another sixty-six years. The Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act was signed into law by President Biden in March 2022.
16 October 2022
