Just Mercy is just brilliant
Just Mercy (M, 136 mins) Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★1⁄2
In 1987, Walter ‘‘Johnny D’’ McMillan was arrested while driving to his home in Monroeville, Alabama. He was charged with the murder of a young white woman. Despite the case against him being incomparably flimsy – the state’s only evidence was an uncorroborated statement from a convicted felon with a history of mental illness – McMillan was locked up on death row a full year before he ever appeared in front of a jury.
He was convicted and then spent a further six years on death row before the newly formed Equal Justice Initiative and defence attorney Bryan Stevenson took on McMillan’s case.
What followed was as farcical as it was tragic, as Stevenson and his team tried every legal avenue open in the State of Alabama to get the evidence re-examined and the case against McMillan either thrown out or retried.
Just Mercy takes the facts, compresses and elides a few events and characters into a tidier narrative stream, but mostly just lays out what went down, often using dialogue lifted directly from transcript.
This is a powerful, intensely moving and necessary film. Courtroom dramas – the ones based on actual events especially – can become inert on screen, but
Just Mercy keeps the story percolating with a judicious use of exterior and prison scenes, other intersecting stories of life in smalltown Alabama and a cast who – collectively – seemed to hit every beat director Destin Daniel Cretton
(Short Term 12) asks of them. How exactly Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx both managed to not pick up an Oscar nomination is completely beyond me.
Jordan – as Stevenson – brings steely control and a deep well of restrained rage. Foxx simply reminds us – again – what a brilliant performance he can hand in, given the right script and direction.
I did wonder whether Just Mercy maybe slipped in presenting the allwhite Alabama police and prosecutors as too blatantly, overtly racist to be real. But having read a little more on the case, I’m inclined to wonder if the film didn’t actually go a little easy on them.
Just Mercy is a steady, unflashy and necessarily talkative film, but it never stopped engaging me and propelling me along its arcs. In the ‘‘what film was robbed of an Oscar this year?’’ debate, the case is closed.