Till: civil rights drama flattened by its own immaculacy
Despite wonderful performances by Danielle Deadwyler and Jalyn Hall, Chinonye Chukwu’s film, about the campaign for justice following the violent murder of young Black teenager Emmett Till, is undermined at every turn by a jarring obviousness.
Just before its end credits roll, Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, about the campaign for justice waged by Mamie Till in the wake of the kidnapping, torture and murder of her 14-year-old son Emmett, delivers one final blow: “The Emmett Till Antilynching Act was passed into federal law on the 29th of March 2022.” We are left to sit with the knowledge that Mamie’s efforts to seek some kind of redress for an unimaginably deplorable, deeply American crime took 67 years to bear fruit.
Chukwu centres the film on Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler). We meet her as a strikingly glamourous figure, driving her beloved son to do some shopping in Chicago. But, eyes brimming with tears while Abel Korzeniowski’s rich score echoes ominously, she seems already to foresee his fate. Emmett, played with radiant exuberance by Jalyn Hall, is excited to visit his cousins in rural Mississippi, but is doomed to return in a box.
Both Hall and Deadwyler are wonderful in their roles, and the film has many truly devastating moments. But some of Chukwu’s directorial choices make it surprisingly difficult to feel, rather than simply see, the human cost of the tragedy. The rationale behind aestheticising Black bodies while refusing to show violence being enacted upon them, and depicting the all-Black town of Mound Bayou as a glistening utopia, is clear – too clear, to the point of appearing calculated. When the casket is being viewed and a woman says she cannot bring herself to look at Emmett’s mutilated body, Mamie practically breaks the fourth wall to say, “We have to,” before the camera fixes on what remains of her 14-year-old son. The power of Mamie’s choice – of having an open casket and a public funeral, so pictures of her son’s body could be published in the international press – is restated so frequently and bluntly that it loses its impact.
The supporting cast all perform with style and grace. Whoopi Goldberg, Sean Patrick Thomas and Frankie Faison play Mamie’s loving and devastated family, while Tosin Cole and Jayme Lawson bring a strength and dignity befitting the activist couple Medgar and Myrlie Evers. Much of the film sees Mamie paired off with other characters, engaged in duologues on grief and motherhood while tears pour down their faces. But even the most complex of performances can be in the service of the broadest of dialogue. Mamie speaks of having to always present herself as beyond reproach; the film seems weighed down by the same burden, so caught up in its own unimpeachability that it flattens the people inside it.
► Till was one of the Gala films at the 2022 London Film Festival; it was screening on 15 and 16 October.