TILL

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

Whether or not to recommend Till is an unusually tricky question. It’s a very well made film overall, but that skirts the real question here, which is whether the world needed this movie right now or not. Or I suppose more specifically, whether Black America needs this film right now. There are reasonable arguments either way, although I lean toward the idea that White America particularly needs to see this film, as it, in a way, represents the steady weakening of awareness of and empathy for shocking ongoing violence against Black Americans.

On the other hand, there is the very pertinent question: is Till profiting off of Black trauma? The marketing for this film struck an unusual tone in some of its theatrical trailers, featuring interviews with director and co-writer Chinonye Chukwu, who is seen noting that the film begins and ends with Black joy. What goes unsaid there is the fact that said Black joy merely serves as bookends to Black trauma, and especially Black grief, which makes up the majority of the film’s run time. It’s both right and a relief that no Black violence is actually seen onscreen, and Till is objectively better for it—but that doesn’t change the fact that violence against Black people, and specifically a real-life case of horrific violence against a 14-year-old Black boy, is what the entire movie is about.

To clarify, Till is less about the murder of Emmet Till himself—twenty years ago and in the hands of a different director, we would have been subject to a horrific sequence of the attack in great detail, serving only to traumatize and re-traumatize audiences—than it is about the fallout of that murder. The fact of that attack, which occurred in 1955—is widely known, but it could be argued that how his mother, Mamie, handled it is less known. Wisely deducing that “no one would believe what I just saw,” Mamie Till-Mobley not only invited a reporter to take a photo of her mutilated son’s body, but insisted on an open casket funeral with no reconstruction done on his body. Horrific, yes—but also effective.

Admittedly I was a little trepidatious myself going into this movie, having mixed feelings about what I may see onscreen and how it would be depicted. I am happy to report that, in a world where the movie Till has to exist, it’s done with about as much sensitivity as one could hope for. I keep thinking of the shocking and horrifying attack depicted in the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, winning Hilary Swank an Academy Award, and in retrospect it’s easy to wonder what purpose that sequence truly served. Possibly a sequence like that served greater purpose in 1999 than it would in 2022, I don’t know. All I can say is, not only does Till not feature any scene so graphic (although, full disclosure, there is a brief, wide shot from across a field, in which you can hear Emmet screaming from inside a distant cabin), but Till understands that it’s not the story most worth telling. It’s the way Mamie’s insistence on defiantly publicizing what was done to her son changed people’s lives.

To be clear, however, a lot of Till is still very hard to watch. Not because of violence, but because of raw, primal grief—of which there is a lot. (And isn’t there trauma inherent in either case?) Danielle Deadwyler is incredible in the lead part, heart wrenching in both her grief and her resolve; her embodiment of Mamie is unforgettable.

If you were to look up the real life Emmett Till, you would see that Jalyn Hall is a dead wringer for him, and thus also very well cast. It would be tempting to feel, in the film’s early scenes, that his innocence and bright-eyed ignorance is laid on a little thick, but it does us good to remember this was the mid-fifties, a far less cynical time, and Emmett being “a jokester” is on the record by people who knew him. He was just fourteen years old, significantly sheltered in their Chicago existence by his mother. Brushing away the 21st-century tendency to regard even fourteen-year-olds as corruptible regardless of race, there’s really no reason not to trust this depiction of him.

If nothing else, what Till does lay on a little thick is the unneeded foreshadowing, especially in Bobby Bukwosky’s cinematography and Abel Korzeniowski’s score. In the early scenes, even while we’re supposed to be witnessing their “Black joy,” there are tracking close-ups on faces that clearly telegraph something horrible is about to happen to these people. This is especially the case with the camera closing in on Mamie’s face, the score shifting to ominous horns that fall one step short of sounding like a horror movie: she has no idea what’s coming!

Emmett Till was from Chicago, but was killed in the deeply racist town of Money, Mississippi, visiting an uncle and cousins. Chukwu’s direction takes care to make sure we know racism also exists in Chicago, but there are degrees, and as Mamie puts it, “the rules are different down there.” Mamie’s divorced parents also live in Chicago, and her guilt-ridden mother, Alma, is played by Whoopi Goldberg, in perhaps her highest-profile dramatic film role in twenty years. She largely disappears into the part (an no, she’s not in a fat suit) , barely recognizable as a woman irrationally but understandably kicking herself for encouraging her grandson to go on this trip.

On the whole, I fall on the side of Till being slightly imperfect and certainly not for everyone but well worth seeing. I wouldn’t go out of may way to pressure any Black people—or any people of color, really—to see it, even if by chance they’ve never heard of Emmett Till. (“Knowing your history” would never be a valid argument here. Even if a person of color isn’t familiar with Emmett Till, they are surely well aware of countless more recent examples of very similar kinds of violence; there’s no need to tell anyone to sit through any depiction of yet another one, no matter how sensitively done.) Some may bristle at my deliberately racializing what audiences to recommend Till to, but I don’t particularly care. It’s White Americans, really, who have the most to gain, some level of historical perspective and insight, from seeing this movie—and to be clear, it still doesn’t really feel like “homework” either. It’s a compelling narrative on its own terms, with its own means of reaching audiences. I suspect this is something Chinonye Chukwu understands.

You’ll get a sense of who he was as a person, with great potential, rather than just as a victim.

Overall: B+