‘Just Mercy’ Should Not Be Ignored
By: Chris Barsanti
Tags: Jamie Foxx, Death Penalty, Movies, Marvel, Brie Larson

Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan in ‘Just Mercy’ (Warner Bros.)

You might not have noticed it, but one of the best-acted recent major-studio dramas was just released into theaters. That is because, despite the presence of bankable stars like Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, and Captain Marvel herself, and a riveting true-life story about a bona fide champion of justice, Warner Bros. has shown about as much confidence in the commercial prospects of Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy as Sony did in the bungled blink-and-you-missed-it release of Charlie’s Angels.

Jordan plays Bryan Stevenson, shown here at the somewhat rocky start to his storied career as a crusading freshly-minted Harvard lawyer who goes to Alabama to advocate for death-row prisoners. As deeply and searchingly earnest as the movie itself, Jordan’s Stevenson shows up in the town of Monroeville, hoping to provide better representation for defendants facing a deck heavily stacked against them due to the weight of systemic racism and poverty. Ironically, the town seems more eager to celebrate the fictional civil-rights victory from hometown hero Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (“Have you visited the courthouse?” is a common question) than consider whether in reality it might be putting the wrong man to death.

Top on Stevenson’s list is Walter McMillan (Foxx, sly and nuanced), whose race, backwoods poverty, and reputation for having had an affair with a white woman all conspired to get him apparently railroaded for the 1987 murder of an 18-year-old white girl. The case against him was as miserably lop-sided as something out of a bad novel, ranging from one heavily coerced eyewitness who couldn’t have seen what he claimed to a raft of witnesses who could have cleared McMillan but were either never interviewed or intimidated into staying quiet. Cynical that anything could ever change and not wanting to get his hopes up, McMillan proves almost as tough a nut to crack for Stevenson as the case itself. The first case Stevenson needs to win is convincing McMillan to let him try and reopen the case at all in order to save him from the electric chair.

While one part of Just Mercy follows this fairly straight-forward narrative of McMillan’s fight to introduce even the basics of fairness to a reconsideration of his client’s case, another almost more dramatic thread tracks his broader crusade. With the exception of Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking, many capital-punishment dramas tend to pivot on the innocence of their main character. Given the broader remit of Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative — a still-extant organization whose bootstraps beginning the movie chronicles through the character of McMillan’s operations director Eva Ansley (a sprightly Larson)— Cretton’s movie gathers in other stories to tell a more expansive message about inequity.

One of the death-row inmates housed next to McMillan, Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan), is a haunting case of a man mentally shattered by war-time trauma and emotionally crushed by the guilt of a murder he committed later. Richardson’s is the case where the movie, fully inhabiting Stevenson’s abolitionist stance against the death penalty, draws its line in the sand, having one character remind a stammering and terrified Richardson that “Whatever you did, your life is still meaningful,” a line almost certain to raise the hackles of vengeance-minded types who imagine that one more death somehow balances the scales of another. Richardson’s execution is an expertly constructed sequence that lays out the practice’s banal brutality in a quietly harrowing manner.

Jordan and Brie Larson in ‘Just Mercy’ (Warner Bros.)

Almost as effective is the introduction of Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson), the fragile and easily coerced eyewitness who put McMillan behind bars after being himself tossed by police onto death row strictly to frighten him into saying what they needed. As scarred by his foster upbringing and a childhood accident as Richardson was by his Vietnam War service, Myers is a particularly affecting example of the kind of powerless people who get ground up by the machinery of systems of power.

Just Mercy is not a complicated story. There is a hero. There are villains. Speeches are made. The righteousness of its cause is not put into question. Lacking some of the emotional fireworks of Cretton’s more anxious and melodramatic debut Short Term 12, this is a quieter and even somewhat square piece of work.

But uncomplicated does not equal simplistic or lacking in drama. Cretton coaxes great performances out of all of his cast, particularly the secondary characters (Nelson is a standout, as is the ever-charismatic O’Shea Jackson Jr., as another death-row inmate). He also frames many scenes in this crusading story not as one righteous man against an entire system but more as ensemble pieces with gatherings of like-minded friends and family bucking each other up against a dark tide of intimidation and hopelessness. That skill, reminiscent of how Ava DuVernay constructed much of Selma not as stiff historical reenactments but warm familial gatherings, makes Just Mercy vibrate with emotion when it could have fallen flat through the curse of good intentions. (That knack for group dynamics will likely serve Cretton well for his upcoming and somewhat improbable-seeming Marvel outing).

So the next time you hear somebody complain that the studios only put out raunchy fluff, superhero extravaganzas, and kids’ movies about sarcastic toys, ask if they got out to a theater to see Just Mercy. Studios often underestimate what audiences want to see. We do not want to see what will happen if their ever-lower expectations are proved true.