‘Marshall’ captures the spirit of a stalwart civil rights icon
Director Reginald Hudlin has already received the best review ever for his new movie, Marshall.
At a private screening of the drama (in theaters Friday) based on civil-rights icon Thurgood Marshall’s early days, his son John W. Marshall took the filmmaker aside and told him, “Man, thank you for bringing my dad back.”
“I’ve seen the movie six times, and each time I pick up something different. I can’t see it enough,” says Marshall, 59, a former Virginia secretary of public safety.
The film centers on Thurgood Marshall years before he helped desegregate public schools in 1954 in the famous case Brown v. Board of Education and became the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court in 1967.
Set in 1940 when he was a crusading NAACP attorney, Marshall (Chadwick Boseman) is sent to Connecticut to team with local lawyer Sam Friedman (Josh Gad) in defending a black chauffeur (Sterling K. Brown) accused by a socialite (Kate Hudson) of rape and kidnapping.
Doing justice to Marshall was key, but Hudlin wanted to avoid the trap of being overly reverent where “you don’t make a movie, you make a statue, and statues are boring,” the director says.
“I felt my job was to take him off the pedestal, put him at eye level with us fellow mortals and make a movie about a man — an amazing man, but a man. That way, when he has his amazing achievements, we appreciate them so much more.”
Some truth was too good to leave out of the film, like Marshall being “gagged” by the judge and not being able to litigate the case — instead, he had to serve as second chair to the green Friedman.
“Like he says (in the movie), even the Grand Dragons of the Klan down South never gagged him. That happened in Connecticut,” Hudlin says. “We all embraced the fundamental challenge of the premise: We’re going to have Muhammad Ali and his hands are tied behind his back. Can you win the fight?”
But there was a “certain amount of extrapolation” involved, Hudlin says. There isn’t footage of a young Marshall in court, so Boseman’s legal personality was built on biographical research and conversations with family and colleagues.
“What kind of person has the arrogance to say: ‘I’m going to go to some town where they lynch black people after dark and they’ve never seen a black lawyer ever. And I’m going to convince them to change their minds.’ Who says that, right?” Hudlin says.
“It’s a combination of arrogance and selflessness, because honestly, he could stay in Harlem. He doesn’t have to risk his life like this, but he does.”
What most impressed John Marshall, though, was the way Hudlin, Boseman and screenwriters Michael and Jacob Koskoff captured the spirit, confidence and sense of humor of his father, who died in 1993 at age 84.
“That’s very much the way my dad was: He could be deeply serious and the next minute he’s back to laughing,” he says. “Obviously, no one’s in the conference room with the justices on the court, but I can imagine those kinds of moments where he would tell a story to break the tension.”