*/****
starring Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, Frankie Faison, Whoopi Goldberg
written by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu
directed by Chinonye Chukwu
by Walter Chaw At once a muddle and overly simplistic, Chinonye Chukwu’s Till is told in a broad visual style that signals “prestige picture,” replete with slow and stately circular pans and, in one appalling instance, the dolly zoom Hitchcock made famous in Vertigo to dramatize a mother’s pain upon confirmation of her son’s death. It’s handsomely decorated, and its costumes went on a national tour with the film’s rolling release, which feels as oblivious as a tie-in fashion show for Schindler’s List would have. That the screenplay, by a trio of authors including alleged Till scholar Keith Beauchamp (whose contentions a grand jury partially refuted in 2007), trafficks in debunked accounts of the inciting event in the film is one thing, but Till plays loose in favour of testimonies that eyewitnesses have since recanted, thus leaning towards Carolyn Bryant’s account–Bryant being the white store clerk who falsely accused 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) of making verbal and physical passes at her in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Her accusations led to Till’s kidnapping, torture, and murder, his body left for boys fishing in the river to discover. Till’s mother, Mamie, insisted he be returned home to Chicago, and though the corpse was bloated by its time in the river and mutilated by the attentions of the backwoods crackers who killed him, she held an open-casket funeral that earned national attention.
Already, Till is asking some serious questions. In choosing to present the oppressors’ version of the story, it’s saying that even if the worst of what was reported had happened, Till still didn’t deserve to die. Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) didn’t carry a photo of a white woman in his wallet that he showed people while bragging about a white girlfriend. He didn’t tell Bryant (Haley Bennett) she looked like a movie star. His friends didn’t hustle him out of her shop. If Emmett whistled, Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler) said it was because he had a stutter he occasionally tried to alleviate by whistling at the beginning of a sentence. It was an impediment he developed after a bout with polio, but the Emmett of the film doesn’t stutter. The Emmett of the film is portrayed as a figure so idealized, he feels like the kind of unkind caricature white people create when they’re making fun of Black people they perceive to be stupid and childlike. His actions in the film, then, leering at Bryant and then wolf-whistling at her appreciatively as he leaves, not only contradict the established narrative–they don’t make sense coming from a character presented as a sweet summer child, so wide-eyed and sheltered he couldn’t possibly have done what he’s accused of doing. Till is a mess. The message cannot be that regardless of whether Emmett broke the unspoken racial caste of an American state (whose capital city, Jackson, doesn’t have a working water system in 2023), he didn’t deserve to be lynched and that Emmett was a literal angel who couldn’t possibly have done what he was accused of, on purpose or by accident, and didn’t deserve to be lynched. Both might be true, but presenting both as true is the product of an uncertain hand at the rudder and a committee doing its best to cover all the bases at once. The crime isn’t having a point of view; the crime is pretending to have every point of view.
The murder is over and done with in the first half-hour of this 130-minute film. It happens discreetly, off-screen–a good thing, because everyone’s had enough of seeing Black bodies brutalized in ostensible entertainments, but also a bad thing, because Mamie Till’s decision to show the world her son’s defaced flesh was so that white people couldn’t sanitize the evil they do under the banner of white supremacy. There’s a scene where Mamie is first shown her son’s body that Chukwu handles with another slow push-in, the better to denote reverence rather than rape. The real Mamie recounts in history the stench of decomposition was notable from blocks away–meaning that when movie Mamie puts her head on her dead son’s chest, I wasn’t thinking about a mother’s grief in that moment, but rather how Till was doing its best to make the corpse of Emmett Till as palatable as possible for us, the audience. Who is the audience for this film, anyway? Is the moral of this story that Mississippi is packed to the gills with ignorant, inbred white folk who’ve voted for generations against their self-interest while ranking last in the nation in most measurables involving education, income, and health? Is the moral that these white folks blaming Black folks for everything that’s gone wrong in their lives is a condition created by leadership getting rich off harvesting this crop of fear and loathing? Is Till, then, about how not only has nothing changed in the 70 years since the events it depicts, but our nation is, in fact, more balkanized now than it has ever been? After all, in 1955, conservatives still seemed to care about children being murdered. And if this film is about any of those things, who is it for? What is it for?
I think the answer is an uncomfortable one. I think Till is about the scene where Mamie tells the court about identifying Emmett’s body. Her eyes flutter, she trembles; she delivers an impassioned speech about tracing her hands over the “parts of a boy I’d nurtured and loved. Nothing and no one could hide him from me. A mother knows. Your mother would know. And I knew, I knew, this was my boy, Emmett Till. Beyond any doubt.” This is not what she really said, but it’s delivered at the length of an Oscar clip and will surely serve in that capacity. The theory goes that a film’s responsibility is to entertainment, not to history, yet I wonder about the morality of enhancing a story that neither requires nor benefits from enhancement. Embellishing details in a film that revolves around a historical atrocity is…what’s the word I’m searching for? Disgusting. Till is also about a scene that ultimately isn’t there: the one where Mamie’s cousin Moses (John Douglas Thompson) stands up in court to positively identify one of the murderers. At the time, Bill Minor, a journalist for the NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE, called this “the most dramatic thing I saw in my career.” He described Moses sitting heavily after fingering the defendant as proof of the impact of a Black man testifying against a white man in a Mississippi court. Chukwu endeavours to communicate this first through dialogue, then through a rack-focus onto Moses’s finger during his j’accuse. There’s drama in the history here–and Till fumbles it.
Immediately following her testimony, Mamie is glimpsed in a double-paned window, her image smudged and repeated in a way that generally denotes existential uncertainty–a hidden identity or motive in a noir. I don’t think it means anything in Till. Just like the architectural establishing shots of characters framed in doorways and down halls don’t mean anything. Just like the final images of Mamie taking off her jewelry and watch in extreme close-up, seemingly a set-up for a revelation, are merely another Oscar clip as she makes watery proud-eyes at the shade of her boy. Till is for white people to feel like they gave at the office. It’s a movie that makes you feel good when it should make you feel lousy. Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman ends with images of Charlottesville and Trump stoking racial division and violence today, now. Till ends with intertitles celebrating the passage of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching act in 2022, 67 years after his murder. That’s not a victory, that’s a fucking indictment. The Nazi Party and insurrectionists of all stripes are welcomed in our Congress and our courts. Openly. There is no more accountability in 2023 than there was in 1955. Nothing is better. So what is Till about that it doesn’t immediately contradict? Who does it hope to reach outside of the Green Book demographic desperate to excuse their ideological peers who have banned the distribution of movies like Till in schools and libraries across the forever Bellum south? In the act of being about nothing, it could have at least had the shame not to be a pandering, spineless, equivocal olive branch extended to the same people who would fashion it into the cross they’re burning on your lawn.
