Till a Good Film, but not a Great One

 

 

TILL (2022)

Directed by Chinonye Chukwu

United Artists, 130 minutes, PG-13 (disturbing images, racism)

★★★

 

 

 

Is it possible to make a Hallmark-like film about one of the most stomach-churning episodes in 20^th century history? Allegations of racism ensued when neither Till nor director Chinonye Chukwu received Academy Award nominations. For once, though, the Academy was on target.

 

We should not confuse a compelling subject with a great movie. For instance, Pearl Harbor: Day That Will Live in Infamy (2001) was a loud romance with bad dialogue, The Help (2011) was a white girl fantasy, and Winnie Mandela (2013) a mess. Till is much better but it’s a decent movie, not a distinguished one.

 

First, a bit of history. In August 1955, Mamie Till-Bradley reluctantly allowed her 14-year-old son Emmett to travel from Chicago to Mississippi to visit his cousins. He was warned about Southern racism and told to be polite and deferential to whites. Alas, Emmett was said to have wolf-whistled Carolyn Bryant at her husband’s small grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Her husband Roy and his half brother J. W. Milam abducted Emmett from his uncle’s home. His bloated and decomposing body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River. He had beaten, shot in the head, and sunk into the river with a cotton gin fan. Emmett was so badly disfigured that many local whites denied it was his body. Mamie had Emmett’s body sent back to Chicago and displayed in an open casket to call attention to racism. Nonetheless, an all-white jury barely deliberated before acquitting Bryant and Milam. During the trial, Emmett was also said to have assaulted Carolyn and aspersions were also cast on Mamie’s character. (Thereafter, Bryant and Milam bragged of having slain Emmett.)

 

Till is more Mamie’s story than her son’s, though Jalyn Hall gave a convincing performance as Emmett. His was a nice mix of a 14-year old’s charm, naiveite, and presentation as more world-wise and mature than he actually was. Danielle Deadwyler was terrific as Mamie, whom she transforms from protective mother to activist. We watch her simmer as she tries to bite her tongue during the Bryant-Milam trial, then regains her voice in the civil rights movement.

 

Till ultimately trips over a flawed script and Chukwa’s conservative direction. Call it a missed opportunity. Emmett Till’s murder galvanized the civil rights movement so thoroughly that the event has become a familiar narrative. Chukwa could have shed light on Mamie, whose post-1955 life is less known. Perhaps Chukwa was stymied by how to dramatize her story. Mamie was initially fiery and outspoken–presented in the film as a brief addendum–but most of her work was organizational and educational.

 

To circle back to the film’s conservatism, there is a lot of time wasted in presenting the extended Till family as a black counterpart to the white Golden Fifties myth. Mamie is such a doting mom that today we’d call her a helicopter mother. Whoopi Goldberg and Frankie Faison appear as her parents to add additional dollops of domestic bliss, and the script infers that Emmett’s father was killed in action. In truth, Louis Till went into the Army instead of jail after abusing Mamie after they separated. In Italy he was accused of rape, was court-martialed, and hanged. His was probably another miscarriage of justice, but the film sidesteps the impact on Mamie and barely mentions that she divorced her second husband when Emmett was 11. One might think such matters are personal, but they were not in 1955; both came up during the Bryant-Milam trial.

 

How do we explain that most critics praised the film and most who saw Till recommended it? First, not many have seen it; Till’s box office returned just half of its cost. Second, audience scores stripped from critic responses are not as enthusiastic. The Metacritic audience rating is 7.1, which is hardly a ringing endorsement in our age of grade inflation.

 

Chukwu’s focus suggests a “family” picture, but it’s ultimately tepid where it should scorch. If the idea was to avoid making a voyeuristic murder drama, why resort to grisly images (a realistic mannequin) at all? Especially at the expense of giving short shrift to the courtroom misjustice? Or truncating the Medgar Evers backstory?  

 

Till is an unstirred mix of domesticity, brutality, racism, and triumphalism (see the scroll over at the end). I admired Mamie Till-Bradley-Mobley, but it’s hard to get past the fact that her son was and always shall be the center of this great American tragedy.

 

Rob Weir