Till

A sustained wail of maternal grief wells up from deep inside Till. It’s the heartrending sound of a mother mourning the unspeakable death of a child. In August 1955, 14-year-old Chicago resident Emmett “Bo” Till (Hall) traveled to a small rural community in the Mississippi Delta to spend time with his cousins, accompanied by a great-uncle who lived there (Thompson). The African American teenager returned home in a wooden casket. Lynched, bludgeoned, and shot in the head, Till’s mottled and mutilated body was found in the nearby Tallahatchie River days after he briefly flirted with a white female store cashier (Bennett) and innocuously wolf-whistled at her. Although the two accused white men (one of them the young woman’s husband) were acquitted of all charges by an all-white male jury, the brutal and racially motivated murder helped galvanize a civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and reenergized the mission of the NAACP. Most recently, the memory of young Till’s death became a rallying cry during Black Lives Matter protests.

Somewhat unexpectedly, the perspective of the murdered boy’s bereaved mother, Mamie (Deadwyler), dominates Till. While many other actors in the narrative have their moments, albeit small – a difficult pretrial conversation between Mamie and her Uncle Moses, to whom she had entrusted her son’s safety, is particularly memorable – Deadwyler’s performance rules the film. She carries the emotional heft of her role with authority, hitting all the high notes in Mamie’s radicalized transformation into a committed activist for racial equality. (She reminds you a little of the great Angela Bassett, but softer.) Movies about the social or political awakening of everyday people (think Norma Rae) who see the big picture can inspire the soul; if wary of the easy trope of human deification, they’re capable of convincing you an untapped noble purpose lives in us all. While it can get rightfully goose-bumpy at times, what distinguishes Till from most other well-intentioned films telling similarly themed stories set during this tumultuous era of American history is the absence of white saviors. It’s about time.

While the script takes certain historical liberties, such as the sanitation of the deceased Louis Till, Emmett’s father and Mamie’s first husband (the man was no saint), the biggest distraction in Till is its prettified visual sense. No question: It’s nice to look at, but the impeccable veneer belies the ugliness of what lies beneath. Catalog-ready clothing always looks dry-cleaned and freshly pressed; perfectly conditioned automobiles gleam as if just washed and waxed; and no one seems to hardly break a sweat in the Mississippi heat, even when standing in a cotton field on a sunny August day. It’s a puzzling choice in production values for a movie that otherwise strives to be genuine. Go figure.