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

Fruitvale Station

Director Ryan Coogler

FRUITVALE STATION       B+              

USA  (90 mi)  2013  d:  Ryan Coogler

Coming on the heels of the Trayvon Martin shooting Shooting of Trayvon Martin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, many Americans view any young black kid as a threat and a thug, where some believe there is no value in his life at all and he likely got what he deserved, judging him instantly through racial perceptions, where they might be surprised he had never been arrested and never had any criminal record, yet there are literally millions who simply refuse to see Trayvon’s potential as making the least bit of difference in their lives.  Then a film like this comes along, offering rare insight into the complexity of a young black man’s life, yet what’s perhaps most troubling is it touches on perceptions already racially etched in stone, becoming a parable on race in America, a eulogy on the offspring of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.  This is a film one can approach through a variety of different pathways, each of which might blur the vision of other viewpoints, where viewers tend to see what they want to see in projects like this one, based on a real life incident where an unarmed young black man was shot and killed after being detained by white BART subway police in Oakland, California, where coming into the theater people already have formed views and opinions about the subject matter, especially this one, which typifies everything that is wrong in America.  While on the surface it deals with troubling realities that tend to be sensationalized in the media—young, black, unemployed, hair-trigger temper, criminal history, blighted neighborhood, unmarried with child—all of which fit the profile of how America views “high crime,” barely batting an eye when the news spews out reports of daily shootings and killings, where life seems to matter less in racially segregated, crime infested neighborhoods, but this film digs beneath the surface and examines the day to day complexities faced by residents living there.  It’s perhaps too easy but altogether necessary to cast a racially incendiary slant on the story, where all too often white cops end up murdering black youth.

Blacks are arrested at nearly 3 times the rate of other Americans, where the rate is even higher for murder (6 times) and robbery (8 times), while the likelihood of black males going to prison in their lifetime is 28% compared to 4% of white males and 16% of Hispanic males, and if that black male drops out of high school, the number skyrockets to 50%.  Matters have only been made worse by the War on Drugs, where in the past decade, the Department of Homeland Security has funneled $7.1 billion dollars in grants to local police departments, which have been used to provide local departments with military hardware, including tanks and armored vehicles, spying facilities and technology, access to national databases and infrastructure, and equipment for use against political protests.  While supposedly combating “terrorism,” the intended target tends to be urban areas with a large and highly condensed minority population, the regular sites for drug raids and arrests, where blacks in particular have a higher sentencing rate than other Americans, even for identical crimes.  So while this bias is built into the criminal justice system, it also reflects the mindset of local cops on the beat, where at the moment it is estimated that the police kill a black man, woman, or child every 28 hours, which is an increase from a few years ago when it was every 36 hours.  Nearly half have no weapon on them, or anything resembling a weapon when they were killed, though in more than a third of the cases the police allege the victims displayed a weapon, often disputed by witnesses on the scene, as only 18% (less than one in five) are actually armed.  Even though women are less likely to be killed, in a glaring way they are included in a troubling number of these deaths, as 20% result from women initiating a distress call to police for domestic violence issues, where rather then removing the agitated offender, he is shot and killed.

While one may not know the exact statistics, most are familiar with an overall racial disparity *before* they see the movie, so many bring their pre-conceived perceptions with them into the theater, which the filmmaker addresses immediately, as the opening few shots of the film are readily available and already viewed by millions on TV or YouTube through blurry cell phone camera footage of Bay Area Rapid Transit cops beating Oscar Grant and his friends on a subway platform just after 2 am in Oakland, California on New Year’s Day, 2009, ending with a gunshot YouTube Oscar Grant Clearest Video Of Shooting Post it!!! - YouTube (1:59).  Oscar had already been detained and is lying on his stomach, head to the pavement, as one policeman tries to cuff him while another has his knee in his back, when inexplicably one of them draws his service revolver and shoots him in the back POLICE SHOOTING AT BART STATION - OSCAR GRANT - YouTube (3:28).  Since this is based on a real life incident, the outcome is already known by the opening shot of the film.  The filmmaker then takes us back into the preceding 24 hours leading up to that moment, shot in a cinéma vérité style using a handheld camera, where the life of the victim is the actual subject of the film, and based on the dramatic power of the performances, which are considerable, his life is not only memorialized, but humanized, where the film puts a face behind the heavy stream of statistics by asking us to spend a day walking in someone else’s shoes that may be unfamiliar to a majority of viewers.

The movie has already won significant awards, including the Best Dramatic Film and the U.S. Audience Choice Award at Sundance, while also winning the Best First Film in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, where it received a rousing two-minute standing ovation.  In some ways, this film resembles BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991), another character driven depiction of the everyday violence that consumes so many lives in South Central Los Angeles, but that film focuses on senseless gang violence.  While some may find this film to be a jolt of social realism that finally attempts to address the issue of racial injustice in America, including crimes against black men, but there isn’t a hint of police involvement in this film until the actual incident, as whatever trouble Oscar had previously with the law, which included two brief stints in prison for drug dealing, he has only himself to blame for getting himself into those situations.  Since he does nothing to provoke the officer, some insist this is a blatant execution, seen in strictly black and white racial terms, but it’s difficult to understand an intentional murder in front of so many witnesses, though the police do significantly overreact, especially on an evening that is already filled with overly rowdy, high or inebriated New Years revelers, where the outcome of this particular occurrence feels more like a tragic accident inflicted by an amateur cop.  The incident led to marches and protest demonstrations, even riots expressing a furious outrage at the crime.

Rather than address the social conditions that precede this incident, where the music and movie industry both go to great extremes to accentuate black stereotypes, including a thug culture that promotes street credibility, where prison time produces bragging rights among gangsta rap artists, which sells more records, the director cleverly assumes the audience is already familiar with all that.  So rather than a piercing piece of social criticism, Coogler chooses a simpler more minimalist route, where Michael B. Jordan plays Oscar with convincing believability as we follow the mundane details of his daily routine, including flashbacks years earlier when he was in San Quentin prison (where his mother’s visit is one of the most riveting scenes in the film), as we watch how he handles the various pressures of the day.  While he’s butted heads with a variety of people, he’s already walking on thin ice with his beautiful wife Sophina (Melonie Diaz), who recently caught him with another woman, has left a traumatized impression for being away so long with his adoring 4-year old daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal), and he’s hiding the fact he’s been fired by his boss for coming in late so often, while his mother (Octavia Spencer) watches him like a hawk, having had her heart broken once or twice already.  

This is largely a day-in-the-life film, where Oscar awakes promising to make a fresh start on the New Year, where the drama unfolds through his personal relationships with friends, family and various acquaintances, where much of the day is spent attempting to make amends.  Oscar is in nearly every scene, where the film’s authenticity is constructed by a build-up of low key sequences given a near documentary look, where because of the nuanced, understated subtlety involved, a major complaint could be registered against the way he is portrayed by the filmmaker, where the contrived goodness of his character is overemphasized, optimistically making him larger than life in the few brief hours he has left, almost as if he’s finally seen the light, which certainly has a manipulative feel to it, especially knowing the eventual outcome.  But rather than go overboard with scathing negativity, as some critics have done, one might simply conclude the filmmaker intended to express a view that Oscar, like Trayvon Martin, had the potential to do good.  The true power of the film, however, comes from the amazing performances that literally “make” the film, as the leads are quite simply astonishing, where the lasting mental impression is how articulate and fully developed several characters become in such brief screen time, as Octavia Spencer and Melonie Diaz literally nail their scenes.  But it’s Michael B. Jordan’s film and he deserves plenty of credit, rising to the occasion and ultimately making this film matter, providing the dramatic heft the film needs to expose the senseless tragedy of what has become an all-too-often, everyday occurrence.