Just Mercy (2019)
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
The powerful true story of Harvard-educated lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who goes to Alabama to defend the disenfranchised and wrongly condemned — including Walter McMillian, a man sentenced to death despite evidence proving his innocence. Bryan fights tirelessly for Walter with the system stacked against them.
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5 films that influenced Just Mercy
What critics say influenced Just Mercy
It’ll be interesting to hear people compare this to The Green Mile and in many ways, Just Mercy shows how derivative and racist The Green Mile truly is.
For those who have never seen this type of courtroom drama, never exposed to “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial,” “Conviction” with Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell, “The Green Mile” based on a Stephen King novel, or “The Shawshank Redemption,” will be particularly riveted by this intense drama.
One of the film’s most wrenching scenes is right out of “The Green Mile,” when Stevenson witnesses the execution of Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan, TV’s “Stranger Things”), a troubled war veteran whose fatal injection goes horribly wrong.
Racism, the structural inequality of the incarceration system, and the inhumanity of the death penalty are issues that have all been tackled in movies before, from To Kill A Mockingbird to The Green Mile , but rarely if ever with the frankness and immediacy that Just Mercy brings to McMillian and Stevenson’s journeys.
A historical courtroom drama making a full-throated appeal for criminal justice reform, “Just Mercy” recalls '90s movies like “A Time to Kill” or “The Shawshank Redemption,” a throwback to the sort of serious, adult drama studio pics that don’t really get made anymore in this era of multi-billion-dollar franchises.
For those who have never seen this type of courtroom drama, never exposed to “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial,” “Conviction” with Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell, “The Green Mile” based on a Stephen King novel, or “The Shawshank Redemption,” will be particularly riveted by this intense drama.
If you’re looking for the early favorite for the audience award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, (a prize “Green Book” took with it all the way to Oscar glory) look no further than the riveting legal drama “Just Mercy” based on the book of the same name by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson.
And although the movie overall handles issues of race and class with less complexity than the also-currently-in-theaters Clemency, if we still have to tell stories that remind white people that racism is bad, actually, at least they’re presented with more grace and effectiveness than Green Book or The Best of Enemies.
However, it did when the audience award at the Chicago International Film Festival and seems to be adored for the same reasons as last year’s Green Book, so maybe it’s your 2019 Best Picture.
There’s been buzz around Toronto that Just Mercy is being positioned as the successor to Green Book, and while for a lot of film lovers that’s not exactly great praise, Cretton’s film is absolutely less problematic and more worthy of awards attention than this year’s Best Picture winner.
Likely to please the same demographic who awarded Green Book the Best Picture Oscar at the most recent Academy Awards, Destin Daniel Cretton’s feature- his fourth overall – can be added to the pile of “true life stories whose real power and emotion lies in the real events, not the film itself”.
Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables is not an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel, despite taking place in Montfermeil, the subsect of Paris where the novel was set.
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Just Mercy is a skilled and valuable film, but it comes in an era when filmmakers are finding astonishing and creative ways to explore and challenge racism, from Get Out to Sorry to Bother You to If Beale Street Could Talk to The Last Black Man in San Francisco .