Boseman brings young Thurgood to life
A workmanlike but vividly acted courtroom drama dealing with what one 1941 newspaper account called “the most sensational sex mystery in history,” director Reginald Hudlin’s “Marshall” takes the narrow road in biopic terms. The screenplay by Jacob Koskoff and Michael Koskoff doesn’t wrestle with the famous achievements of the man who became the first AfricanAmerican U.S. Supreme Court justice, notably Thurgood Marshall’s crucial role in Brown v. Board of Education and the beginning of the end of legal American segregation.
Largely successfully, “Marshall” instead uses the 1941 trial in Connecticut v. Spell as a way of introducing audiences to its subject. The case involved Joseph Spell, a chauffeur working for a wealthy family in Bridgeport, Conn., accused by his employer’s wife of sexual assault and attempted murder. Spell was black; his employer’s family was white. Marshall, an African-American, was on the bare-bones payroll of the struggling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The NAACP hired Jewish insurance attorney Sam Friedman (Josh Gad) as co-counsel. “The only way to get through a bigot’s door,” Marshall reminds his initially reluctant and overmatched colleague, “is to break it down.” The film tick-tocks between the two men, wary allies at first.
“Marshall” deploys speculative flashbacks to what happened on the night in question between Spell and Eleanor Strubing, seen from various points of view. The actors find the small and large moments “Marshall” requires. Chadwick Boseman brings a steady gravity to young Thurgood. He’s the opposite of a flashy actor; he works carefully and shrewdly. This is his third major biopic; he’s already played Jackie Robinson in “42” and James Brown in the more adventurous and provocative “Get on Up.”
“Marshall” is as much Gad’s movie as Boseman’s, for better or worse. Does the script marginalize its own protagonist? A little. Maybe a little more than a little. At the same time, the case was argued by two men, not one, though Marshall himself was not allowed to speak in the courtroom except in whispered asides. The judge (James Cromwell) refused to allow Marshall full participation, even though Marshall was clearly the more gifted litigator.
Sterling K. Brown’s grave, intense Spell registers strongly, while Kate Hudson lends an imperious, defiant air to the battered wife of a vicious man who’s either telling the truth or lying for reasons to be determined at conveniently timed dramatic junctures.
On a modest budget and shooting largely in Buffalo, N.Y., doubling for Bridgeport and various New York City locales, director Hudlin goes for as much period flavor as possible. The movie belongs to Boseman and Gad. There’s enough in Thurgood Marshall’s story for another two or three movies, but this one’s an engaging chapter in the early morning hours of the civil rights era.