True life fight for legal justice
IN THE late 1980s, a young Harvard-educated lawyer, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B Jordan), visits Monroeville, Alabama, and is repeatedly told that he should visit the museum that immortalises the famous novel set in that town, To Kill a Mockingbird.
By coincidence, Stevenson is down here to defend a wrongly accused African-American man, just like the heroic Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s popular novel.
The difference in this true-life story is that unlike Finch, Stevenson is no “white saviour” but African American himself.
As such he is subject to intimidation that no white lawyer would ever face.
Local cops pull him over for no better reason than he’s driving a car.
On visiting clients in prison for the first time, he’s strip searched.
Stevenson’s client Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx) is a local lumber worker facing the death penalty for the murder of a white woman based on the flimsiest of evidence.
With the help of volunteer paralegal Eva Ansley , Stevenson begins the uphill battle of appealing the conviction, although the challenges they face range from landlords reluctant to rent them offices to death threats.
This good old-fashioned travestyof-justice movie is by Hawaiian-born Destin Daniel Cretton.
Cretton is carving out a niche as a maker of social justice dramas such as the excellent Short Term 12, which he based on his own personal experiences working in the foster care sector and which proved a springboard to bigger things for actors Larson and
PERFORMANCES ARE A SAVING GRACE.
Lakeith Stanfield.
Cretton has adapted Bryan Stevenson’s memoir with a lot of empathy for black communities victimised by systemic racism, although the film occasionally succumbs to sanctimonious speechmaking and other courtroom cliches. Performances are a saving grace. Coen Brothers favourite Tim
Blake Nelson impresses as a scarred and twitchy felon whose unreliability as a witness seeps from his every pore.
There’s also an affecting portrayal by Rob Morgan of one of McMillian’s death row comrades that suggests that it’s not only the innocent who might be worthy of a measure of mercy.