David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Review of Just
Mercy)
Just Mercy
It doesn’t pay for critics to be jaded, and belittle a
movie because it fits a worn, familiar category. That’s a typology trap, a
quicksand of presumptive judgment. Still, I admit to wariness before seeing Just Mercy. The title is a tad pleading,
with hints of homily. And this is another prison and courtroom drama drawn from
facts, about an innocent, condemned man who desperately needs a good lawyer
(and gets one). Thus, says jaded reflex: another petri dish for earnest
close-ups and speeches, with a niche life on cable television. Well, watch and
learn. Also: think and feel.
Just Mercy hits generic marks without sinking into them, because
director and main writer Destin Daniel Cretton tells the story with astute
focal clarity and patient regard for making lived facts live again. When he
puts emotional hooks into you, you don’t feel chumped (they’re clean hooks).
There is no hint of budget waste, the Alabama settings shot by Brett Pawlak
don’t rely on corn, grits or gravy, and the acting is terrific. Jamie Foxx is
Walter “Johnnie D.” McMillian, a middle-aged harvester of pulp wood in the
pines outside Monroeville. He had a loving wife and nine kids but was known to
have shown interest in a white woman. So in 1987 the local law (virtual
shorthand for the White Citizens Council of segregation fame) hustled Walter to
the state’s Death Row. This was after cops freaked a forlorn, pathetic con into
“confessing” that Walter had killed a white teen girl. No confirming evidence (indeed the reverse), just righteous
Caucasian justice. Local whites felt pretty safe from rebuke. Monroeville,
hometown of Harper Lee, takes pride in its To
Kill a Mockingbird museum, an image shrine and cordon sanitaire for the town’s racial reputation.
Michael B. Jordan is no Gregory Peck as Bryan
Stevenson, the black pro-bono lawyer who went down South, saved Walter from
imminent electrocution, opened buried evidence, confronted his framers, even
got Walter onto 60 Minutes before his
cruelly delayed release. Peck’s Atticus
Finch is a fictional ideal, a Southern knight of rectitude. In his more
plodding, dutiful way, Jordan reveals Stevenson as a genuine hero. His tense
decency and expressive eyes align with Foxx’s haunted, stellar intensity, in a
shared purpose that is totally convincing. The excellent cast has Brie Larson
as Stevenson’s associate, Karan Kendrick as Walter’s wife, and Rob Morgan as a
PTSD war vet who can’t catch a break.
The chaw-down bonus is veteran Tim Blake Nelson. As
Myers, the po-boy cracker who framed Walter, Nelson inherits the lowlife mantle
of feral racist Bob Ewell (James Anderson) in Mockingbird. But, for all his snarls (“Yew gonna buy me a Coke,
first?”) and face deformed by a childhood fire, Nelson’s Myers is a full
person, seen with the alert compassion that gives the movie a special grace. In
a few small stretches Just Mercy can
feel like reading a thick legal brief in a sweaty room. But everyone in the
story is entirely alive, and the hum of its truth resonates without
hard-squeezing us like Mississippi Burning
or A Time to Kill.
Despite my initial resistance, I had to see the film.
I’ve admired Destin Cretton since he made the wonderful San Diego short about a
bold, boyish dreamer, Drakmar: A Vassal’s
Journey. Cretton advanced to the bravura Short Term 12, then its feature-length version, and then lifted
Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson with The
Glass Castle. Here is more confirmation that his care for acting,
atmosphere and complex motivation is instinctively right. Rarely has a true
story better earned its ending info scrolls, or gotten so much from a Death Row
“last mile,” or topped its closing court scene with the pretty judge chirping
like a Dixie belle, “Well, y’all made my job easier today.” Not an easy movie –
yet easy to admire.
SALAD (A List)
17 Ace
Performances of the Incarcerated
Paul Muni as James Allen in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Burt Lancaster as Joe
Collins in Brute Force (1947),
Richard Conte as Frank Wiecek in Call
Northside 777 (1948), William Holden as J.J. Sefton in Stalag 17 (1953), Francois Leterrier as Fontaine in A Man Escaped (1956), Susan Hayward as
Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958),
Burt Lancaster as Robert Stroud in Bird
Man of Alcatraz (1962), Sean Connery as Joe Roberts in The Hill (1965), Paul Newman as Luke Jackson in Cool Hand Luke (1967), Tom Courtenay as
Ivan in A Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich (1970), Yves Montand as Gérard in The Confession (1970), Robert Redford as Henry Brubaker in Brubaker (1980), Daniel Day-Lewis as
Gerry Conlon in In the Name of the Father
(1993), Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, also Morgan Freeman as Red Redding and
James Whitmore as Brooks Hatlen in The
Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Sean Penn as Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking (1995).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire
de Chateau Welles)
Citizen Kane was an intensive, happy shoot, with only a few
mishaps. When rehearsing the scene of Kane rushing down a stairwell after Boss
Gettys, shouting “I’m gonna send you to Sing Sing!,” Orson “fell heavily on his
left ankle, chipping the bone. The crew called Welles’s chauffeur Miss Trosper.
She took him to the hospital in a limousine. The day began to descend to drunken
highjinks when Welles started to self-medicate, drinking brandy from a flask.
He was ‘not blind drunk,’ Trosper reported, ‘just sort of cute drunk.’ At the
hospital, still in costume as middle-aged Kane, his finely crafted makeup began
peeling off. When Trosper went to sign paperwork, Orson wheeled away on a
rolling binge. ‘With a whoop,’ she recalled, ‘he went lickety-split down the
hallway in his wheelchair, scaring the hell out of people.” (With no help from
brandy, the stairwell scene is very effective. Quote from Harlan Lebo’s book Citizen Kane.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
As
part of his inspired overhaul of Raymond Chandler’s dated, uneven novel The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman “put
Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) into a bachelor pad atop L.A.’s High Tower
Drive, a pipe-stem street in a skinny Hollywood canyon. Designed by Carl Kay,
the Deco-stucco complex is totally noir, with a separate elevator tower rising
to decked flats. A European ancestor is found in Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves: ‘And the whole is
dominated by a tall slender tower that blossoms out at the top, after the
matter of Italian towers, into overhanging machicolations.” (From the Elliott Gould/Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie
image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.
Philip
Marlowe (Elliott Gould) will fetch brownie mix for topless hippie neighbors on
High Tower Drive, but otherwise pays them little mind in The Long Goodbye (United Artists 1973; director Robert Altman, d.p.
Vilmos Zsigmond).
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