Till (2022)
Now in Limited Release, opens Wide October 28
Jaylin Hall as Emmett and Danielle Deadwyler as his mother Mamie in Till
In August 1955 Blacks nationwide recoiled at 14-year-old Emmett Till’s grisly murder. No one I knew was entirely shocked, but everyone bristled at the mutilation of a helpless, unarmed child’s body, and his white killers’ arrogant flouting of the law.
There’s also no doubt that this cowardly act, never fully redressed in the courts, is still brooded over today.
In the wrenching, horrific story the movie Till recovers for us, “safe” appearance and behavior too often were a Black person’s only protection. But, North or South, they were never entirely reliable.
I say the movie “recovers” this gruesome tale because it has to inch forward into today’s consciousness. As you watch, 1955 seems a long time ago, as it’s meant to.
The director, Chinonye Chukwu, and her co-screenwriters, Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp, have taken a beautifully human-scale, period approach to a volatile story, and let the camera roam and rest easily among these civil, cultivated Black Chicagoans nearly seven decades ago.
Young Emmett Till, it’s made clear, wasn’t raised in discord, so he bore nothing from his stable upbringing or in his genial boy’s temperament that would necessarily bring harm to him.
Yet the moviemakers don’t shy from sometimes lighting him with a faint glow, signaling that he’s a target, over and above being a normal – he had a slight stutter – young teenage boy. He wasn’t ever asking for trouble. He wouldn’t, with the adoring care of his sensitive, protective mother Mamie, have known how.
Sweetness, however, is powerless.
That’s why the early scenes with Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler) playfully teasing Emmett, called “Bobo” (Jaylin Hall), in their neat apartment suggest a fluttering anxiety being passed from mother to son.
Mamie later tells a packed, unsympathetic Mississippi courtroom, with sneering whites looking on, that as a mother her “hands were always busy”. And the constant touching, gentle prodding and spontaneous dancing we see shared by mother and son aren’t just warm parental moments, but acutely, nervously tactile reassurances.
Their tight closeness is as fraught as it is nurturing. His mother doesn’t want “Bobo” to go to Mississippi. He earnestly wants to widen his view of the world beyond Chicago.
The incident that led to the taking of his life is now engraved in national dishonor, and over the years varying impressions of it have drifted in and out of the national mind.
In this movie events are plainly, sometimes starkly, depicted yet remain deeply perplexing. What did this boy do to cost him his life?
Astonishingly little. Visiting Mississippi, bored picking cotton and hanging about with nothing much to do, Emmett begs his country cousins to take him into the sparsely populated but at least somewhat lively town of Money.
There, Emmett naively almost seems to forget he’s in the Deep South. Entering a country store, patronized almost entirely by Blacks, he hungrily eyes a huge jar of candy and appears to be just as taken with the pretty white woman behind the counter.
As young boys did back then, he’s secreted in his wallet a photo, from a magazine, of a pretty movie star – white. He shows the white clerk the photo and tells her she’s “pretty”, too. Her unsmiling eyes glare back at him. Maybe to placate her, Emmett wolf whistles at her, and smilingly leaves the store.
But the racial gulf opens to swallow the young boy. In short order, white men, shrouded in darkness, wielding guns and waving flashlights, storm the home where Emmett is staying with his uncle and cousins. They haul off the young man and later we hear, from a distance, his howls of anguish as he’s tortured.
A phone call to Chicago informs Mamie that Emmett has been “kidnapped”. Before long she’s told the worst: Emmett’s disfigured body has been found. Mamie faints. Her child’s hideous death for a moment stills her, too.
Emmett’s body is returned to Chicago by train, within an enormous wooden box. Even before the box – it looks like some ancient, unearthed totem – can be opened, Mamie breaks down in twisting, shaking, howling grief.
In Deadwyler’s wrenching performance, Mamie’s piercing cry to take her son out of that box! rends the air as if to shatter the wood to atoms.
There’s more pain to come. In a morgue, Mamie goes through an agonizing hands-on examination to positively identify the boy’s lifeless body as Emmett’s.
Then, daringly, she insists that at his funeral the coffin remain open. She wants the world to see what white hatred did to her son. Photos appear in newspapers across the country, and public outrage mounts.
She agrees to testify at the Mississippi trial, to clarify for the uncaring jurors that indeed it was Emmett’s body her hands had caressed in that Chicago morgue. Jeers from whites in the courtroom – only a handful of Blacks were permitted seats; the rest had to stand – don’t deflect from her clear identification of her son.
The national outcry continues for months, and Mamie becomes a powerful symbol, as well as a public speaker, in the Civil Rights Movement.
Danielle Deadwyler as civil rights activist Mamie Till-Mobley in Till
But we know that Emmett’s death has never been “explained” in any way that actually comprehends the racism that killed him. His murderers were freed, and later described their horrid acts in Look magazine, for a payment of $4,000.
Till the movie, as much homage as history, fiercely insists that Emmett’s abbreviated life has become morally immeasurable. It casts a spell that in the years since has only widened. The picture also tries to unmask what’s even more vast, the blind hatred that welled up like a storm and wiped him off the planet.
The movie is overwhelming because it focuses on feeling in two senses of the word.
One meaning is gentle physical touch, a mother’s hand conveying affection through the trail it traces across her young son’s livid, welcoming flesh.
The other meaning is a grieving mother’s touch turned nearly, but never actually, repellant. Mamie’s hands try to read the identifying features – nose, lips, belly, and curved, engorged toes – of her son’s grotesquely swollen corpse.
Deadwyler’s staggering, immensely moving performance finally puts Mamie’s tenderness as well as her shattering trauma on the same plane, both pulsating. We feel we’ve met a renewed woman by the movie’s end. A son cruelly snatched away hasn’t diminished her; in death he’s redoubled her devotion to his memory and to caring about the lives of millions more.
Other performances reverberate, too. Hall perfectly embodies Emmett’s smiling immaturity. It comes to seem that Mamie has slightly over-sheltered her son, in Hall’s coltish eagerness, his guileless grins. Even after we’re shown Emmett’s defiled body, we can recall this young man’s beaming face just as Mamie does.
Tosin Cole is both warm and somehow a calming historical giant as activist Medgar Evers, who helps Mamie understand the national civil rights struggle she’s entered into.
Jayme Lawson gives a sharply ironic turn as Myrlie Evers, who’s completely sympathetic to Mamie’s tragedy, but seems to sense – we’re invited to read this in Lawson’s face – the ever-implacable racism that will take her husband’s life in 1963.
John Douglas Thompson as Emmett’s Uncle Moses searingly explains to Mamie that if he’d shot those raging white men on that fateful night, he’d have unleashed a slaughter that could have engulfed all of Black Mississippi. One life ended, weighed against other lives saved, had to be calculated in a mere moment, a knife-edged decision that Moses knows will haunt him.
Till helps us to understand that in our current century a Minnesota police officer’s life-crushing knee or a bullet fired by a Chicago policeman into a fleeing young Black child’s back have the same dark root as the violence we see onscreen here.
That poisonous tree, planted in America’s soil with the arrival of slave ships, flourished in 1955, and widely, unstoppably abides today, rending Black lives for no good reason whatever. The tears down my face as I watched Till clarified that much.