The final movie will probably be Lena Dunham's Sharp Stick, because it's short and I don't expect it to have an earth-shattering impact on a list that will be all but done and dusted, to use the Australian phrase.
I intentionally made sure that I gave myself more than 24 hours with Till, since I did figure there could be an impact on my list with that one. You never want to wait too long on a quality movie lest it force you to rethink everything you've pretty much committed to permanence. (I can in fact remember three instances of movies making my top ten on the final viewing day, though I had no choice on two of them -- Inside Llewyn Davis and The Hateful Eight -- because they only just had their Australian release that day. The third, Love is Strange, just took me by surprise.)
I won't of course reveal how high up in my rankings Till will land, but I will say I'm glad I squeezed it in. I was always planning to see it, and knew that an iTunes rental date of January 17th lined up with those intentions, but as the final week took shape I knew I'd think of it as a Monday night sort of movie, and that's what ended up happening.
It was a Monday night sort of movie because there was a good chance this would feel like homework. At the very least it would be depressing. No one really wants to unwind from a long day -- which included a trip to the hardware store and an emergency zoom regarding the relocation of my son's basketball practice, in addition to work -- with one of the most awful racial hate crimes in American history, if only because it was perpetrated against a child.
But Till really surprised me with its choices and being more than a handsome and well acted recreation of an historical event. The thing I wanted to focus on is:
Whose faces to show, and not to show
Among the thoughtful choices any director must make is how to dole out the screen time, because it speaks to what you care about most in the story, and whose voice is given prominence. Till director Chinonye Chukwu made some particularly interesting choices in that regard, and it has all to do specifically whose faces to show, and for what reason.
To show: The dead Emmett Till in his coffin. The movie purposefully does not speculate about what actually took place when two miscreants murdered the boy his mother called Bo at the behest of a young white woman who was offended when Bo told her she looked like a movie star. A scene showing the severe beating and ultimate killing would have been exploitative in addition to speculative.
But we did need to see the aftermath, because the world saw it. Till's mother Mamie asked a photographer to take pictures of the face that barely looked like a face so that they could be published internationally, and light a fire under the civil rights movement that helped spur the 1957 Voting Rights Act, two years later, into existence. If the world saw it then, we needed to see it now. And yes, it was horrifying. And yes, that's why we needed to see it.
To show: Mamie Till on the stand. In an impressive unbroken take that underscores exactly how much Danielle Deadwyler is bringing her game here, Emmett Till's mother takes the stand in the trial of his accused murderers and is questioned by both the prosecution and the defense. The scene might be as long as five minutes, I'm not sure. Possibly longer. The camera never moves from a close-up of her face as she changes hands between those who will treat her carefully and kindly to those who will not. We also needed to see the anguish of this mother as she does something that could theoretically put her own life in danger as well.
Not to show: The men who killed Emmett. The temptation is to give a big, ugly, redneck, racist face to the villainy in your movie, but Chukwu resists it. You get glancing views of these men, sure, but you see them only in the shadowy nighttime, when they first kidnapped Emmett, and from side angles in the courthouse. Fifteen minutes after finishing the movie I mightn't have been able to pick them out of a lineup.
The explanation? It gives too much oxygen to hate, plus it suggests that these two men were guilty of something that the others around them wouldn't have been guilty of if given the same chance. The real villain here is the systemic racism of this entire town of Money, and this entire state of Mississippi. To show them on screen would be to glorify their actions, so we cut away from them, the same way the cameramen cut away from someone who runs on the field during a baseball game. These are not two men who deserve an additional thought from us, whose actions aren't deserving of even the minimal spotlight of making them identifiable in a story that is fundamentally about them at a basic narrative level. I won't even give you their names.
Not to show: The attorneys defending these men. Same reason. They're part of the problem, not the solution.
To show: The woman whose complaint led to the death of Emmett Till. Chukwu does not hide all her villains. Perhaps because she wanted to document the inciting event -- when Emmett wolf-whistled at the girl in that shop -- Chukwu does show us Carolyn Bryant, played by Hayley Bennett, who was somewhere between a girl and a woman at age 21. And we later hear Bryant's reprehensible testimony during the trial, in which she accuses the boy of physically grabbing her and talking about his past experience with white women.
I think we need to see the face of the person who enables and encourages racism without herself participating in a murderous crime. If Carolyn Bryant doesn't go running to tell her husband or other men with lynching tendencies what passed between her and Emmett Till -- which history has determined was the mild version depicted in Till, not Bryant's version -- then Emmett Till might actually still be alive today. He'd be 81.
To show: The Black faces inspired by Mamie Till. Chukwu finishes the film profoundly with Mamie and her father (Fankie Faison) leaving the state of Mississippi before the verdict is read, because she says "I know what the verdict is." As they are driving, a likely fanciful scene shows all manner of Black pedestrians nodding to her appreciatively as she passes, recognizing what she has done for them, for all Black people, even though it will not bring two murderers to justice.
Later, we see a number of others applauding her at a civil rights speech in Harlem. The camera movies from person to person, from a low angle, capturing more than just their faces. But in those faces, we see people galvanized for the fight ahead.
As much as these moments all contributed to the impact of Till, the most impactful moment, where the realization of all this really sunk in, may have come when Mamie first gets to Mississippi and is being escorted by a local contact to the place she will stay. After he's already been on screen for a few minutes, and she gets out of the car, she says "Thank you, Mr. Evers." And he says "Call me Medgar."
In eight years this man will also be dead, his life also lost in a greater fight. A fight that, sadly, is still not over today.
