CHICAGO — Now in theaters, “Till” is the story of a mother, a mother’s son and the horrific 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, who was visiting relatives in Mississippi at the time of his murder.
The killers were acquitted and lived as free men, long after confessing, proudly, to Look magazine the following year. The decision of Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s grieving, quietly galvanized mother, to hold an open-casket funeral for her son, and to allow Chicago’s Jet magazine to publish photographs of Emmett Till’s brutalized body, sparked a civil rights movement. Generations later, the murders of Black citizens continue, sometimes prosecuted, sometimes not. The events dramatized in “Till” point like an invisible arrow to where we are today.
But the movie does not work like a tract, or a polemic. It’s not that kind of storytelling, and it shifts its perspective to pay careful, sensitive attention to Mamie, played with exquisite emotional insight by Danielle Deadwyler, before and after her son’s abduction and slaughter. The events of “Till,” which have been adapted for television and depicted several times before, are awful to witness. But there is more than one way to handle this American history.
In the hands of co-writer and director Chinonye Chukwu, whose previous feature was the 2019 prison drama “Clemency,” “Till” trades in deliberate aesthetic choices to convey what the Tills endured: silence and lingering, expressive close-ups without an overt sense of editorializing or amping-up feelings and actions that need no extra emphasis.
Take, for example, the crucial scene where Mamie is shown the body of her son, at first from a calm remove, with the body itself just out of sight.
“As a director,” Chukwu told me in a Chicago interview last week, “I’m thinking: What is this moment about? It’s about Mamie’s emotional experience, seeing the body for the first time. We’re taking the body in as Mamie is taking it in. In shooting and editing the scene, we needed to communicate the love and tenderness she has for Emmett. This is her child. We begin with the body obstructed from view by the table. Compositionally that lets us just be with Mamie, preserving the privacy she needs with her son.”
Then, “we slowly move in toward the body, experiencing the sight of it as Mamie is experiencing it. Not in an objectifying way, but in a humanizing way.”
In her callback for the role of Mamie, Deadwyler worked through this scene with Chukwu in a “director’s session” via Zoom, performing in a closet — with actors’ virtual auditions, this is more common than it may sound — at her Los Angeles residence.
“My son was sitting outside, playing Fortnite,” she recalled in a separate interview last week. “I’m, like, ‘Hey, I’m about to go in and do this audition so if you hear some noises, don’t worry, it’s OK, just doing my thing.’ So I go in the closet, we do our Zoom, and Chinonye and I are working it out together.”
Her sister comes home mid-audition, “and I’m doing the scene in the closet, and she and my son hear a wail. She told me later they both looked at each other, in complete shock. And my son goes: ‘Mom says she’s on an audition! She’s OK!’”
More than OK; Deadwyler got the role.
“I tend to cast actors for what they can give me here,” director Chukwu says, finger-framing her face. “Danielle gave me that, times 10. She can communicate the emotional complexities Mamie’s experiencing in ‘Till’ in real time.”
Chukwu wrote her draft of the screenplay using elements (credited) of an earlier version by Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp. The latter made the 2005 documentary “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.” The new film’s producing roster includes Beauchamp, Reilly and Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Alma Carthan, Emmett Till’s grandmother.
Deadwyler’s audition took place last year, and filming commenced later in 2021, in Atlanta (doubling for Chicago in some scenes), with a few days’ location work in Mississippi. In preparation for Mamie, Deadwyler used the nonfiction account “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America” by Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson as “her bible.”
The actor, 40, was taught about the Till lynching in elementary school, in an example of the sort of American history certain contemporary conservative forces want to sanitize or sideline altogether.
“I’m a child of Cascade United Methodist Church,” Atlanta native Deadwyler says, and its spiritual leader, the late Joseph Lowery, worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I did volunteerism as a kid, along with my siblings here. It was a part of our civil rights legacy. So this story is part of my cultural and educational awareness.”
Earlier this year Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a development included in the final credits of “Till.” No one ever served time for Till’s murder.
“No accountability,” Deadwyler says, quietly. American today finds itself in what she calls “a strange crux. This film is asking people to question it, and to challenge it.”
Director Chukwu, who is 37, was born in Nigeria, raised in Oklahoma and Alaska. She did her undergraduate studies at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Her life in America has been marked by a series of dislocations. Her perspective on what America was, is and can be filters through both “Clemency” (starring Alfre Woodard) and now “Till.”
“I grew up going back to Nigeria often,” she says. “Most of my family is there, my parents actually moved back there soon after I went to film school. I’ve been on a constant journey in my formative years figuring out my identity. ‘Cause you’re in this limbo. Right? I grew up in America; I’m American; I go to Nigeria and see my cousins, we all look the same, but we don’t really understand each other.”
At 16, she attempted suicide, and has dealt with depression much of her life, a subject she addresses in a 2015 TEDx Talk available on YouTube. This was several years before she pushed her first feature film, “Clemency,” into existence.
Finding who she was as a Black person in America, then in college finding who she was a Black woman, led to her “coming into my own racialized consciousness. I’m 37 now. I don’t have the time for any more identity crises!” She laughs, a huge and rollicking laugh. “I really don’t have the time!”
With “Till,” the creative collaborators hope to have created a drama light on the customary biopic sanctimony, and more closely drawn to Mamie in particular. “I don’t think about ‘the message’ when I’m telling a story,” Chukwu says. “If the storytelling and the filmmaking are done well, then the rest of it will become clear. That’s another reason I needed to humanize everybody, Mamie and Emmett most of all. If I can connect to the humanity, the emotional core — then I got you.”
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ABOUT THE WRTIER
Michael Phillips is the Chicago Tribune film critic.
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