Just Mercy

Director Destin Daniel Cretton

 

Bryan Stevenson

 

Actor Michael B. Jordan (left) with Bryan Stevenson

 

JUST MERCY            B                   

USA  (136 mi)  2019  d: Destin Daniel Cretton                     Official site

The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving.

— Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (354 pages), 2014

Inspired by real events, the film follows the aspiring career of Harvard educated lawyer Bryan Stevenson, Michael B. Jordan from Fruitvale Station (2013), soft-spoken and reserved, always showing restraint, formally dressed in a suit and tie, adapting his 2014 published memoirs by the same name, growing up in a poor rural community, initially working out of a private residence before setting up practice of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, a law office providing free legal representation to prisoners condemned to death row in the state of Alabama who have been denied access to a fair trial.  According to the film, Bryan Stevenson has worked to release 140 death row inmates in Alabama, where one in 9 death row inmates have been exonerated based on wrongful convictions, resulting in exonerations far higher than for any other category of criminal convictions, where perjury/false accusations and official misconduct are the leading causes of wrongful convictions, which typically go unchallenged by the court appointed lawyers, exposing poor blacks to an unequal judicial process where justice for the poor almost never happens, as it’s reserved instead for the wealthy elite who can pay for it, effectively dividing the nation into two separate and unequal factions where the law is applied differently, disclaiming the inscription engraved into the U.S. Supreme Court building that promises “Equal Justice Under Law.”  Made by the director of Short Term 12 (2013), Hawaiian filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton integrated his own personal experiences from working at a group home for at-risk teenagers in pursuit of altering our perceptions of kids stuck in a dehumanized system struggling for survival.  Here he examines the inequities of the death penalty when empowered and administered by Jim Crow ethical standards, where obtaining a conviction by law and order district attorneys supersedes any pursuit for the truth, as this is the political platform they run on to get elected, making the community a safer place to live, which all but excludes the black community, where residents historically are forced to live in fear of the police and the authoritatively repressive judicial system where innocent men routinely get charged and convicted for crimes they never committed.  Added to the mix are prisoners who did commit crimes, but were sentenced with greater severity due to an inherent bias leveled against blacks.  The effects of racism, such a prevalent condition in our society, continue to exist on so many levels, yet the place where its impact is felt the most is the judicial system where blacks continue to be warehoused into lengthy periods of incarceration at record levels, where there aren’t enough lawyers assisting the poor, and racial minorities are routinely excluded from jury service, particularly in poor rural counties, making it difficult to put an end to these reprehensible and often antiquated practices.  Major cities are not immune from this same racial differentiation, as blacks nationwide are 30% more likely than whites to be sent to prison for committing the exact same crime (Sentencing Commission Finds Black Men Receive Longer ...).  While this film shines a light to expose the inequities, accentuating trials that are marked by blatant racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct while highlighting the damage done to families and communities, yet this inherent racial bias has simply become a routinely accepted standard deeply entrenched into the fabric of the judicial system in America, where the death penalty is a direct descendant of lynching.  By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings for the first time.  Two-thirds of people executed in the 1930’s were black, yet even after the African-American share of the South’s population fell to just 22% by 1950, 75% of people executed in the South were black.  More than eight in ten lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, as did more than eight in ten of the nearly 1500 executions carried out in this country since 1976 (Death Penalty - Equal Justice Initiative). 

One of the inherent flaws of the Hollywood system is there aren’t enough black filmmakers given the opportunity to make films like this, so the stories continue to be told by people outside the black community, offering a more stereotypical vantage point and a decidedly different emotional texture, where the structure of the film itself becomes stereotyped as a crusader movie, where in this case the “white savior” has been replaced by a “black savior,” yet in Alabama, the ultimate decisions are rendered by white judges from one of three appellate courts, the state Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals, and Court of Civil Appeals, totaling 19 judges, where there is a noticeable absence of black judges in such prestigious positions, (Why Aren't There More Black Federal Judges in Alabama ...).  One of just five states that hold partisan, statewide elections for judges (in a state that is nearly 70% white, where judges boast during their campaigns about the number of death sentences they’ve imposed), since 1994 every black candidate for the state’s 19 appellate judgeships has lost to a white candidate, with the courts remaining all-white and all-Republican (including 41 of the state’s 42 elected district attorneys), where according to a 2012 report, white judges are four times more likely than minority judges to dismiss race discrimination cases.  Despite overwhelming evidence to suggest bias that stems from the days of slavery to Jim Crow to lynching, where the original commerce conducted in Montgomery, Alabama was in enslaved people, the location of Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative office is just steps away from where they once held massive slave auctions, bringing people off the boat, parading them up and down the street in chains, becoming the most active slave-trading space in America for almost a decade, with dozens of cast-iron historical markers celebrating aspects of the Confederacy.  Little has been done historically to humanize the criminal justice system, with this film providing a face for viewers to empathize with, as one of the most incendiary cases is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), known as Johnny D, sentenced to death in 1987 for the murder of an 18-year old white girl who worked as a clerk in a dry cleaning store in Monroeville, Alabama, based solely on the questionable testimony of a white convict, Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson), ignoring multiple black alibi witnesses at the trial, which lasted just a day and a half.  While the jury sentenced him to life imprisonment, the judge (aptly named Robert E. Lee Key) overruled the jury and sentenced him to death, with judicial override accounting for 20% of the people currently sitting on death row in Alabama, a practice that was outlawed by the state in 2017, yet the state persists in executing people on death row prior to the implementation of the law.  Despite the flimsy evidence to convict, McMillian lost all his prior appeals for a new trial.  By the time Stevenson meets him in prison, he’s lost all hope, showing little interest in a wide-eyed Ivy League lawyer from the north who knows nothing about the ways of Alabama.  The tone of the film resembles IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967), pitting the legal sophistication of Stevenson against the antiquity of southern racism, where humiliating blacks and instilling fear is a way of life, fueled by a venomous culture of white supremacy that historically produced lynchings and killings, yet established in heinous acts just how blacks are treated in the Jim Crow South.  In contrast, Atticus Finch, the white court-appointed lawyer portrayed by Gregory Peck in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), was voted as the greatest hero of all American cinema in 2003 by the American Film Institute, AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains - Wikipedia, where the courtroom sequence of the film adaptation was set in a courthouse in that same Monroeville, Alabama that remains the town’s main tourist attraction.  Even in the UK, a 2016 literary survey voted Atticus Finch the most inspiring character in literature (To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch voted most inspiring ...).  And therein lies the problem with films like this, as the white idealization is overwhelming, requiring a Messiah-like figure to stand up to centuries of appalling racial animosity, making audiences feel good, but the entrenched systematic bias continues, where mass incarceration of black people actually defines the era we are currently living in.

While Stevenson has consistently been recognized as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America, awarded a MacArthur Grant among a multitude of distinguished honors and awards, Brie Larson stars as Eva Ansley, adding Southern flavor as the local girl who becomes the operations director, described by Stevenson as “fearless and smart,” who’s been there since the beginning working side by side with Stevenson (actually starting on her dining room table), working long hours into the night, assisting him on his exhaustive research, providing administrative duties while handling the reporting and accounting of their federal funding.  While not an attorney, she’s a mom committed to rectifying what she sees as terrible injustices happening within her community, with most content to allow racial transgressions to continue unabated, but she feels a moral obligation to do something about it, to be on the side providing social justice.  While the film has a formulaic structure to it, the authenticity of the characters stand out, where the best moments are often reduced to small extended scenes in tiny rooms or prison cells, intimate conversations that don’t overreach, becoming remarkably poignant and quietly affecting, offering a deeply ingrained understanding of just who and what we’re dealing with.  Whether it be Stevenson’s visits to Holman Prison or the time spent with each of the death row prisoners he meets, their images are seared into the viewer’s imaginations, becoming permanent fixtures, with each telling their own story of how they became ostracized and rejected by society, stripped of any self-worth, dehumanized, often doubting their own innocence, as that guilty verdict has been drummed into their consciousness.  Stevenson’s role is to take each of these essentially dead souls and bring them back to life, challenging the negative stereotypes, where it’s easy to pass judgment, showing another side, one that viewers can relate to.  He starts by visiting McMillian’s family living on the outskirts of town, mirroring similar visits made by Atticus Finch, where one gets the feeling so little has changed for these families since the Civil Rights era of the last 50 years, where progress was granted to a few, yet a large majority in rural America were left behind, the living examples of a separate but unequal society.  While they’ve essentially taken away all that matters to McMillian, what’s clear is no one in his community thinks he did it, while the white community is in near unanimous agreement that he did.  So when a black lawyer starts poking around with these unsettling, racially tinged cases that already led to a conviction, the white community resents someone stirring up all these ancient memories, as they rest easily, content to lock him up and throw away the key, believing the case is closed.  Rafe Spall is Tommy Chapman, the newly elected white District Attorney, yet he shows no inclinations to reopen the case, believing Stevenson is alone and isolated, where he is perceived as no threat.  But the more he looks into these cases, the more he becomes convinced these cases are a travesty of justice, filing legal briefs bringing new evidence into light that question the legitimacy of the verdict, yet appeals courts in Alabama rarely overturn the convictions of death row inmates.  While there are setbacks along the way, and frequent intimidation tactics that recall the times of antiquity, one central focus of the film is witnessing in stark detail the execution of a prisoner, a chilling reminder of what this is all about, as Alabama consistently has one of the highest execution rates in the United States, executing 11 people convicted by juries of a life sentence, overridden by judges and instead condemned to die.  It’s an emotional tearjerker fraught with heartbreak and personal anguish, as setbacks are built into the system, creating an underlying feeling of helplessness and systematic malaise, but Stevenson and his crew persevere, growing his practice, hiring more staff, eventually accomplishing the unimaginable.

Walter McMillian - Equal Justice Initiative

'I went to death row for 28 years through no fault of my own ...  Anthony Ray Hinton endured almost three decades behind bars on death row, wrongly convicted by Alabama’s racist judiciary system, telling his incredible story to Chris McGreal from The Guardian, April 1, 2018

Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society | People ...   Chris Hedges interview with Bryan Stevenson from Smithsonian magazine, December 2012

Bryan Stevenson and the Legacy of Lynching | The New Yorker  Jeffrey Toobin, August 15, 2016

Room

ROOM               B+                  

Ireland  Canada  (118 mi)  2015)  d:  Lenny Abrahamson      Official site

One of the most devastating films you could possibly see, not at all easy to endure, leaving viewers emotionally drained and exhausted afterwards, though in the process making the appalling subject matter feel like essential viewing.   Based on a 2010 novel by the same name from Emma Donoghue, who also provided the screenplay, ROOM is a fictionalized recreation seemingly inspired by real life sexual imprisonment cases like Josef Fritzl who kept his own daughter imprisoned in a hidden cellar for 24-years, sexually abusing her the entire time, or Natascha Kampusch and Sabine Dardenne, all survivors of the worst abduction cases imaginable.  A follow up to Abrahamson’s uniquely compelling 2014 Top Ten List #10 Frank , whose expertise appears to be examining the lives of damaged souls, it doesn’t take long to figure out what we’re dealing with is a trapped existence, as the world onscreen identified as “Room” is a windowless 10-by-10 foot space with a skylight above that is too high to reach.  Inside are a mother and child, with Brie Larson from Short Term 12 (2013) as Ma trying to make life as normal as possible for her young 4-year old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) who has lived his entire life here.  What’s immediately distinctive is the discovery that this world is seen through young Jack’s eyes, providing his own voiceover narration, where this is all he knows, where he’s learned to tell the difference between life in Room and life on television, which is an invented reality, but he has no conception whatsoever of a world outside.  With his long hair below the shoulders that constantly gets in his face, the film immerses us in his mood shifts and daily routines, peppering his mom with incessant questions all day while they do morning exercises, making him run back and forth from one side to the other, play games together, sing songs, share a bath, eat rather common meals that Jack grows tired of from time to time, while Ma reads him bedtime stories like The Count of Monte Cristo (which deals with a prison escape) that challenge his imagination.  Initially it’s all about establishing the monotonous, unglamorized details of their ordinary existence, where each night Jack says goodnight to his bed, toilet, closet, sink, table, chair, all the things he’s intimately familiar with, and in doing so, provides the extent of this claustrophobic, closed-in world.  It’s heart wrenching to see how Ma has spent every ounce of her energy teaching, nurturing, and entertaining this child who loves to watch Dora the Explorer on TV, limiting the time glued in front of the screen as otherwise they would both end up zombies, though occasionally she’s too depressed to even get out of bed in the morning and can spend hours sometimes simply staring out into space at nothing at all. 

In the evenings, Jack sleeps in the cupboard behind wood shutters as Ma is visited by Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), the one who kidnapped her 7-years ago when she was only 19, who opens a steel fortified door locked by an electronic security code, replenishing their meager food and supplies before forcing himself on her at will while continually reminding her how grateful she should be for what little he does bring, constantly complaining of their added “expense,” as he’s out of work, growing violently irritable and quick-tempered if she actually asks for anything they may need.  Sometimes Jack can be seen counting numbers until he leaves, at which point Ma moves him back to the regular double bed where they sleep.  For his 5th birthday, they make a small cake together, but he’s disappointed there are no candles, growing frustrated and temperamental at times, but what’s explicitly clear is they each give one another a reason to live.  Now that he’s older, she tries to expand the world inside to include the one outside, describing bits and pieces of her childhood for him, but he can’t even imagine what’s on the other side of the walls, as he’s never seen it, where the only outside images come from the television.  When the electric power is turned off, she grows more desperate, forced to eat out of cans where frost can be seen on their breath, so she teaches him how to wiggle out of being trapped inside a rolled-up carpet, writing him a note to hand to someone, explaining what to do once he’s finally on the outside, using him for her planned escape.  From the slowed down pace where there was all the time in the world, like their bath when they were splashing water on each other, this rapidly accelerating pace adds a different dimension, creating increasing tension and dread, as Jack is obviously afraid and doesn’t really understand, where she wraps him in the carpet for old Nick’s next visit, claiming he died during the power outage and needs a proper burial, telling him to find someplace nice, where there’s plenty of trees around, growing hysterical at the mere thought of him inspecting the merchandise, screaming to get him out at once, as she can’t stand the sight, leaving her behind in a shivering state of uncontrolled fear.    

Once outside, Jack’s perspective is shown through oblique and distorted angles, becoming an expression of confusion as he’s thrown into the back of a pickup truck, shown from an aerial view as he tries to wiggle out, replaying his mother’s instructions in his head, told not to jump until the truck comes to a stop and then run towards the first person he can find.  But when he’s finally outside, seeing the expanse of the blue sky above, it’s a spectacular moment of complete and utter incomprehension, impossible to even imagine, like waking up on another planet.  It’s a rare cinematic moment, as it should be filled with wonder and rapturous joy, but he’s driven instead by an insane fear that is crippling and paralyzing, as he can’t control where he is and what he’s doing, as every time he tries to run, he stumbles and falls, allowing an angrily pissed off Old Nick to grab him and snatch the note out of his hand, trying to drag him back to the truck, where Jack’s voice fails him as well, as he can’t cry out, but a guy walking his dog just happens to be there witnessing this odd spectacle, where the barking dog appears to spook Nick, who also runs away in fear, leaving a befuddled kid behind who can’t explain where he lives.  It was a risky plan that surprisingly worked, where a kindly female police officer is called onto the scene to try to sort things out, where Jack remains a ball of confusion in exasperated turmoil, unable to comprehend what he sees, where nothing makes sense to him.  Somehow, Officer Parker (Amanda Brugel) is able to decode Jack’s nearly indecipherable comments, turning into a more recognizable rescue scene, where Jack and his panicked mother remain in a state of shock, transported to a hospital room that may as well be a completely made up world.  The rest is harder to convey, where Ma’s name ironically is Joy, as she just wants to be reunited with her family, though the medical staff recommends a transitionary period of adjustment, but they are whisked off instead to a new house somewhere in front of a throng of well-wishers and television cameras swarming out front, creating an utter spectacle that they’re not ready for just yet.  While Joy guts it out, trying to remain a strong presence, she discovers her own parents are divorced, Joan Allen and William H. Macy, that they don’t live together anymore, instead Grandma is living with a new friend Leo (Tom McCamus), all of which scares the living bejesus out of Jack. 

In something of a surprise, the narrative is extended beyond the rescue, where there is obviously more “behind” the story that the public rarely sees, where there are no easy roads to travel, as instead it’s a mish mosh of guilt, blame, wrong turns and recriminations, not to mention constantly adjusted expectations, where the extraordinary patience displayed by the calmness of the grandparents is in stark contrast to the tumultuous mood swings of Joy and Jack, whose behavior couldn’t be more inconsistent, both likely even more seriously traumatized than the film suggests, which may be the only serious flaw in making this material accessible to the public.  Overly timid and uncommunicative, where men in particular are an intimidating threat, Jack adapts quicker than his mother, where he learns to appreciate the kindness and helpful nature of his grandparents, who offer some of the more tender moments in the film.  Joy, on the other hand, is goaded into doing a misguided television interview for a big wad of badly needed cash, feeling the need for financial independence and not be so dependent on others, but she’s ill-equipped for the consequences, where she’s more in denial than ever about her own emotional fragility, unable to make sense of her parent’s split and the emotional distance that has come between them, wrongly blaming herself, feeling worthless and overly guilty for allowing what happened in the first place, as if it’s her fault, seeing herself more as an abject failure, where now that Jack’s found the helping hand of others, she’s not really needed anymore, going on a downward spiral where at some point she simply collapses, requiring extensive hospitalization, where Jack for the first time in his life must fend for himself without her.  It’s a portrait of unbearable sadness, where outside the Room there is so much space to fill, where both are overcome by the vastness of it all that literally overwhelms them with a crushing force they can’t hold off, where it seems there are too few therapists present, as this should be a standard part of the recovery process, but they’re expected to carry the weight of the world on their own.  While we are witness to really standout performances throughout, there’s a beautifully poignant reunification scene between the mother and son when Jack expresses an interest in returning to the Room, where he misses it.  Under police presence, surrounded by evidence tape, it’s hard for Jack to believe that this cramped, miniscule box was his entire universe for the first years of his life, where he remembers it as being so much more, but gone are all the drawings and personal attachments that made it feel like home, where all that’s left is a starkly barren storage shed that has been emptied of all its contents, where silently, under cover of a softly falling snow, they hold hands and walk into the uncertain future together.