Film Review: Till

 

        Jalyn Hall and Danielle Deadwyler as Emmett and Mamie Till    

Here’s a film that makes you sad, then angry, then keeps it up, not letting go or even letting up in its ultimate campaign to convince you that racism must be eradicated sooner rather than later.

Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler) knew what violence was. Her husband was a violent man. When she filed against him, the judge made him choose between jail and the army. He chose the army; they later executed him for rape and murder. The army sent her his only possession: a ring.

Mamie was born in Mississippi in 1921, but her family moved to Chicago when she was two. Mamie and her family were no strangers to racism in either place, but realized their lot was better in Chicago than it would have been in Mississippi.

Mamie had one son, named Emmett Till, who was 14 in 1955. Emmett (Jalyn Hall) was a charming boy, smart and talented (he loved to sing). One day he asked his mother if he could visit his cousins in Mississippi. 

Mamie couldn’t turn him down, but knew what that meant. She wanted to go along, but work wouldn’t allow it. So she had a serious talk, warning him of the danger and exhorting him to “be small down there.” But she had a horrible foreboding.

The world knows the rest of the story. Emmett was a kid, outgoing and friendly, but innocent in the tactics of rabid racists. What he considered an innocent verbal exchange with white store clerk Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett) enraged her and would end in his torture and murder at the hands of several racist white men.

“My son came home to me reeking of hatred,” she says, as she plans the open-casket funeral. She wanted everyone to see the horror she saw.

The trial was, of course, a sham. As someone told her, “No Negro in Money, Mississippi has ever testified against a white man and lived.”

But Director Chinonye Chukka didn’t stop there, because Mamie did not allow herself to stumble through the rest of her life in a haze of unfathomable grief. She decided to do something about racism. She went to meetings and began speaking out in public (but not in Money). 

Horrible as her experience was, the film has a positive ending, as she convinced many that “the lynching of any of us had better be the business of all.” 

Even better, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in March of this year, making lynching a federal hate crime.

“Till” is excellently written and acted (especially by Deadwyler as Mamie) and brilliantly shot, and should be seen by all Americans.