Freedom isn't free - except when it is

Warning: This post contains spoilers about Just Mercy.

The subject of this post is my playful way of telling you -- too playful for the subject matter, probably -- that I watched Destin Daniel Cretton's Just Mercy last night.

Which was, in the wise judgment of the good people at Warner Brothers, made free to rent during the month of June for anyone with an iTunes account, in the wake of the protests on police bruality. Actually, you could get it on any streaming platform, I believe, but iTunes is what I use most.

There were other films that were also free, from other studios, but as June is now over, I can't recall all the titles. I believe Glory and Blindspotting were both among them. I do know that Just Mercy was the only one I hadn't yet seen.

And Just Mercy does indeed showcase plenty of police brutality. It ranges from the in-the-moment specifics that we tend to associate with the term, like handling a suspect too roughly after detaining him with too little cause, to the long-term brutality of imprisoning someone -- nay, sentencing him to death row -- for a crime the preponderence of evidence suggests he did not commit.

And therefore it is also about freedom -- the literal quest for it, among wrongly accused death row inmates, and the metaphorical wish to be free from being born guilty, as Jamie Foxx's Walter "Johnny D" McMillian correctly realizes that he is.

It doesn't seem like a screenwriter could cook up such a flimsy case against McMillian and have you believe that the courts would really send him away with such little certainty of his guilt. And in truth, he or she probably could not. A story like this has to be based on true events, as in fact Just Mercy was.

I'm not going to say it recreates anything essential about the form for "wrongfully imprisoned/righteous lawyer" movies, of which this is a fairly typical example. However, I will say that it is passionately made, felt and acted, and that the best examples of even familiar narratives will always shine through. Especially when the extent to which they are sadly familiar is part of the point.

As it's no longer June, I believe your opportunity to rent this for free has lapsed. But that doesn't matter because we should pay for the things that are worth paying for. And Just Mercy certainly is.

It's called voting with your wallet. It's telling the bean counters that stories like this should continue to be told. In a way, I'm sorry I did get it for free, though I know I wouldn't have prioritized watching it as soon if I had waited for it to come up as a 99 cent rental, which is usually how I handle recent releases that I didn't catch in the theater in time to rank them for the year in question. Seeing that it was available for free, I thought, "Well, that's even a better deal than 99 cents."

And for those who thought like I did, it's good we're seeing this now, as it means we can recommend it to others all the sooner -- like I am doing now.

Maybe I'll even rent it again and just let the 30 days expire without watching it ... or maybe I will watch it again.

Whatever I myself do, Just Mercy deserves to be seen by you, as a reminder of how important it is to help pay for the freedom of those who can't afford it themselves. The lawyer played by Michael B. Jordan, Bryan Stevenson, set up a law practice on a government grant to help inmates on death row, who obviously couldn't pay for the type of legal defense that would free them from that condemnation. Since that practice was set up in the late 1980s, Stevenson et al have helped 140 others in the position that Walter McMillian was in.

Instead of dying by electrocution back in the 1990s, McMillian lived until 2013, when he was claimed by dementia -- the same thing that got my own mother less than a month ago. Unlike my mother, McMillian's dementia appears to have been brought on by the trauma of his imprisonment.

Even if his death was hastened, though, McMillian got to live among a loving family for 20 more years before he died of what were, in most respects, natural causes.

Every wrongly imprisoned black man in America should be so lucky.