Theres a sequence in “Just Mercy” — one of many — that will shake you to your soul. Its the late 1980s, and Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), a young African-American lawyer in crisp gray suits and neckties, with a degree from Harvard, has come to stay in Monroe County, Alabama, to take on the cases of death-row inmates who are innocent. His most urgent client is Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), known as Johnny D., who was railroaded, in a flagrant way, for the murder of a teenage white girl. But Stevenson has other cases on his plate too, like that of Herb Richardson (Rob Morgan), who did commit the crime he was convicted of. He set off a bomb on a womans porch and killed her.
Stevenson has failed to win him a stay of execution, and now the moment of awful truth has arrived: Herbert is going to die in the electric chair. Rob Morgan, who plays him, looks like a sallow, morose Don Cheadle, and he uses Herbs stutter to communicate an underlying melancholy. Herbert, a Vietnam veteran who lost some of his marbles in the war, isnt trying to escape the crime he committed; quite the contrary, hes drowning in guilt. Yet the prospect of death now looms over him with a certitude he finds surreal. “Its different from Nam,” he says with the blankness of defeat. “I had a chance there.”
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On this day of his death, his head and eyebrows get shaved, which leaves him looking like an alien, and more people have been nice to him than on any other day of his life (which is, in its way, just as alienating). Hes twitchy, full of dread, a delicate ghost of a man. As hes strapped into the chair, and “The Old Rugged Cross” plays over the prisons sound system, and the prisoners use their tin cups to bang on the bars of their cells, the movie brings us disturbingly close to his terror. What we see is that it isnt just the fear of dying. Its the horrific realization that his death is part of a system of killing.
That system, with death row as a morbid extension of slavery, is what “Just Mercy” is about. The movie is a true-life legal drama, or maybe we should call it a Civil Rights drama — though part of its special emotional texture is that Bryan Stevenson, in setting out to save the lives of men he thinks of as brothers, and to bring justice to a place where the rule of law is treated as a fig leaf for violence, is fighting for Civil Rights at the moment when America has moved on, dropping that battle from its headlines, as if the fight were no longer necessary. Been there, accomplished that! (Or so said large swatches of white America.) Bryan, from Delaware, has come to the Deep South to carry on the fight in the belly of the beast.
Early on, we see what happened to Foxxs Johnny D., a man with a big mustache and his own lumber business, who got stopped by a police blockade and arrested out of the blue. He was convicted on the basis of testimony by a single witness whose story — that Johnny kidnapped him in his truck, left him alone, then came back, then drove over to a dry cleaner to commit the murder — was a pile of insane hogwash. In a classic drama of racial injustice, which “Just Mercy” both is and isnt (the most powerful aspect of it is the way that it isnt), the movie would consist of a steady drive toward truth, notched with a series of suspenseful surprises.
Yet in “Just Mercy,” director Destin Daniel Cretton, who made an indie splash six years ago with “Short Term 12” and has hardly been heard from since, finds a newly supple way to deliver a liberal Hollywood knockout punch. He lays out the facts of Johnnys case early on, showing us the evidence of his innocence: the obscene (and absurd) lies told by the witness against him; the fact that Johnny, on the day of the murder, was at a fish fry all day long with his family, one that 20 witnesses could have placed him at; the fact that he was put on death row one year before his conviction, just so he could, you know, get used to it. (Yes, that really happened.) Other bits of information trickle in — like, for instance, the fact that the police didnt choose Johnny at random; they had a classic (racist) motive for targeting him.
With the evidence more or less out in the open, “Just Mercy” can settle down into being the subtler drama that Cretton wanted to make: not just a portrait of injustice, but a movie that takes the temperature of the landscape — sketching in how racism works, treating the smallest encounters as expressions of a way of life, and portraying the victims as complicated folks whose thorny, jaunty personalities are a testament to whats been lost in their imprisonment. Monroe County is where Harper Lee was from, and its one of the films motifs that all the residents enthusiastically recommend the “To Kill a Mockingbird” Museum. Its as if they dont realize how, exactly, the book is about them.
As Johnny, Jamie Foxx reminds us why hes a great actor. He plays this man with a Southern music in his voice, and with a cynical intelligence about how the society is structured: as a wall put up in the face of anyone black, especially if theyre poor. But even if theyre not. Early on, Johnny tells Stevenson that hes already been through this with other lawyers, so why bother again? The poison theyre fighting is too entrenched.
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