Just Mercy

Whenever Oscar season rolls around, I always groan a little inside because I know we’re gonna get one or two movies that deal with racism. Now, this is not because I am opposed to films talking about racism – I mean, good Lord, I’m a black kid in a mostly white state whose father educated him about racism from the time he was a little kid, so I would be a fool to not care about it. No, my problem with these films is that they rarely approach the subject in an honest way. More often than not, whenever we get an Oscar season movie dealing with racism, the subject is always portrayed as an individual problem, the product of a few bad apples that can be easily solved by that one enlightened white man, when in reality, the problem is very much systemic.

This is why I was somewhat excited for Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy, because it looked as if it would be tackling the issue of racism from a systemic viewpoint rather than an individual one. And after having seen it, while it doesn’t quite break free from all the tropes, it does have enough unique elements to where I was totally engrossed emotionally.

The film is a depiction of the true story of Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), a lawyer freshly graduated from Harvard who moves down to Alabama and opens a law firm along with Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), dedicated to helping out wrongfully convicted inmates on death row. One of these inmates is Walter “Johnny D” McMillian (Jamie Foxx), who was sentenced to death for the murder of a local white teenaged girl, despite there being no physical evidence to indict him. So Stevenson takes it upon himself and his newfound to firm to liberate McMillian from being sent to execution while facing opposition from the town and a corrupt D.A. played by Rafe Spall.

What I liked about this film is how much it strayed away from the “White Savior” trope. I mean, first of all, it wouldn’t make sense considering the real story it was based on wouldn’t permit it, but also because many of these Oscar season films about race feature the White Savior trope to some degree or another. But not this time. This is Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx’s show mainly, and they hit it out of the park. Foxx does well as a hopeless man who might be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in his life, but Jordan also shows his mettle, playing Stevenson as the fish out of water in this case. All the other cast members like Larson and Spall do very well here, too. Even though I haven’t seen director Cretton’s other films, he shows a steady hand with the camera here, and I definitely am interested to see what he does with Sang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in a year.

I was also impressed with how honest it was with its depiction of the corruption in the criminal justice system, especially in the South. And it’s portrayed as a systemic problem, not the product of a few bad apples, which is always nice to see.

Unfortunately, however well this film handles the subject of race in the criminal justice system, being a Hollywood film, it cannot quite go all the way with its depiction of the system. Even though this film does have some hard-hitting moments, ultimately (minor spoiler alert), it’s still very much a success story with something of a nice ending. I don’t know, maybe I’m too much an admirer of the likes of Spike Lee or Jordan Peele – both of whom worked on Black Klansman last year, which I thought was phenomenal. And clearly, this film is not trying to be a Spike Lee or Jordan Peele film, which is not a bad thing, it’s just not something I usually gravitate towards.

But…dang it if I didn’t feel emotional towards the end.

So bottom line…pretty good, but not able to break free from certain tropes I’m not a huge fan of. However, it is hard hitting enough to not be flattering towards its audience, so it comes with a recommendation from me…however, if you really want to be educated on the injustice in the justice system, watch Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13^th on Netflix, which coincidentally, also features Stevenson as an interviewee.