We who cover what they call “the current cinema: spend a fair amount of timing pining for the glory days of the mid-budget studio picture— and by glory days I mean, oh, a decade or so ago, if that. Studio slates used to be full of these films, year-around, $30-$60 million movies, usually star-driven but geared at grown-ups, hoping merely go into the black theatrically and generate some ancillary profit on home video and cable. Studios still make some of those, but nowhere near as many. And they usually schedule all of them in the fall, so they might play some festivals and score some Oscar nominations or even wins, and make everybody look respectable.
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What’s easy to forget, in our harping over the Age of the Tentpole, is that plenty of those mid-budget adult-oriented programmers were decidedly mediocre, films that were in their own way as formulaic as the superhero movies that have usurped their budgets: take a dramatic but true story, fill it with beloved character actors and exciting up and comers, simplify the complexities and make it properly crowd-pleasing, serve warm. Destin Daniel Cretton’s “Just Mercy” is better than that; its director makes some effort to thwart expectations, and it’s filled with fine performances. But he never quite makes it his own.
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“Just Mercy,” tells the true story of Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), a Harvard-educated attorney who moves to Alabama to start the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal center for Death Row inmates in need of stays, motions, and retrials. His first big case concerns Walter McMillan (Jamie Foxx), a black man sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit in Monroe County— “Home of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird,’” as everyone in town eagerly announces. None seems too hung up on the irony.
The film’s most affecting passages dramatize, precisely and viscerally, the resistance with which the state’s white establishment meets this Northern, African-American lawyer. He’s harassed, threatened, and intimidated; when he first arrives at the prison that houses his clients, he’s subjected to a strip search (“Bend over and spread,” commands the deputy, with a little smirk), and late one night, on a dark country road, he’s visited with exactly the kind of police stop you might fear, late at night on a dark country road. “Ya know, they’ll kill ya if you get to the bottom of this,” he’s warned, and it doesn’t seem like hyperbole. (He initially encounters some resistance from McMillian as well; the tension between them, especially with regards to Stevenson’s comparatively privileged background, could’ve used more exploration.)
McMillan, known in the community as “Johnny D,” had an alibi and multiple witnesses, and it looks like an easy win to Bryan. But no one has ever been freed from Death Row in Alabama. “What makes you think you gonna change that?” Johnny D asks, not unreasonably, and walks out. The story of how Bryan Stevenson kept on fighting for this condemned man, in the face of naked racism and systemic injustice, is an inspiring one, and it’s tempting to praise “Just Mercy” merely because it’s about good people doing a good thing. But that doesn’t necessarily make it a good movie.
Which is not to say it’s a bad one, either; it’s just uninspired, a by-the-books courtroom drama, full of big speeches about justice and equality and Doing What’s Right, moved along by montages and fake-outs. Cretton does occasionally veer from that playbook, with scenes that zing when they’re sailing towards a zag, or a long, tough, sad sequence detailing the execution of one of Johnny D’s Death Row comrades that genuinely reckons with the sheer barbarism of that act. But those detours are momentary, variations from a formula that’s set in stone.
Cretton remains an actor-friendly director, giving his performers long, unbroken close-ups in which to work their big monologues and moments. Jordan’s performance isn’t showy or affected; he just does the work, simply and directly, much like the character. Foxx gets more toys to play with— bad hair, a country accent, the occasional breakdown— but he doesn’t overdo it. And Tim Blake Nelson, hootin’ out of the side of his mouth, comes on with what feels like caricature, and ends up delivering the film’s emotional haymaker. (Cretton’s frequent collaborator Brie Larson, unfortunately, doesn’t get to do much more than show off a convincing Southern accent.)
But Cretton’s instincts fail him with Rafe Spall, who broadly overplays the wishy-washy local D.A. And there are real problems with Cretton and Andrew Lanham’s script— most egregiously, the comically on-the-nose discovery of a wildly incriminating interview tape, and a closing voice-over in which Bryan walks us through what he, and thus we, learned from all this. Even an actor as skilled as Michael B. Jordan can’t carry off an ending this ham-handed.
There’s no questioning the integrity of the filmmakers’ intentions; “Just Mercy” is clearly a film with its heart squarely in the right place. But the broad strokes are just too familiar here, and try as he might, Cretton simply can’t put a fresh spin on them. [C+]
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