Just Mercy (2019, PG-13)

Another movie that didn’t score any Oscar nominations. I saw it just before the nominations came out because I had a feeling that it’d probably get overlooked and I didn’t want it to drop off my radar during my pre-Oscars movie viewing. Another excellent film with a lot going for it.

In the late 1980s, Bryan Stevenson, a young attorney fresh from the bar, travels to Alabama with the intent of seeking justice for death row inmates. Plenty of local people think his work is despicable, especially when he takes the case of “Johnny D.” McMillan, a Black man convicted of murdering a white teenage girl in the community. But Bryan’s goal isn’t to “see killers go free”: it’s to see the legal system do its due diligence for all defendants, regardless of their race or class.

This is a powerful dramatization of a true story I didn’t know much about. Tbe miscarriage of justice that Johnny D. experiences in his case is astounding but sadly true to life – the racial profiling, jury manipulation, and inattentive public defenders he and other inmates discuss with Bryan are still unfortunately all too common today. As Bryan and his right hand Eva move heaven and earth to produce overwhelming evidence demonstrating that their clients’ original trials were unfair, those in power around them find countless ways to ignore and diminish it.

It’s important, I think, that this movie is about events that took place in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Stories about civil rights, especially those set in the Deep South, are often framed as something that ended in the ‘60s when Martin Luther King marched to Selma, the Voting Rights Act was passed, and schools and buses desegregated. But these important victories obviously didn’t end racism or discrimination, and this movie, set more than 20 years after most Civil-Rights-themed movies take place, is an important demonstration of how these topics aren’t something to consign to the past. Scenes like Bryan’s mother crying when he leaves for the South because she doesn’t know if he’ll survive it, Bryan being forced to submit to an unlawful strip-search before being allowed to see clients at the jail, or Eva receiving death threats over “working with that n***** lawyer,” all feel like something straight out of Civil Rights “history” because those attitudes and abuses didn’t just disappear. This collision with history is also shown repeatedly through references to To Kill a Mockingbird, which was set in the very county in which Johnny D. was arrested and which the white locals are very proud of.

Strong acting all around. Jamie Foxx was the one who was getting the most Oscar buzz before the nominations came out, for his affecting performance as Johnny D., but I also really want to applaud Michael B. Jordan as Bryan. I think Jordan is a talented actor who works with such subtlety that his great work can sometimes be overlooked, but he’s wonderful here. Brie Larson does a nice job as Eva, making a strong presence without pulling focus from the Black leads, and the film features nice appearances by Tim Black Nelson and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (who played his dad Ice Cube in Straight Outta Compton.) Additionally, I have to mention Rob Morgan, who plays death-row inmate Herbert Richardson. I’ve seen Morgan in a handful of things before (the Netflix Marvel properties, one of the recurring cops in Stranger Things,) but while he’s never particularly registered for me before, he’s fantastic here. Really, really great performance.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements, language (including racial slurs,) drinking, and violence.