The tragic story of Emmett Till is one of a face. The face of a 14-year-old boy, beaten and murdered in Mississippi, a battered and bloated face that his mother insisted be seen by the world. Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till” is a story of two faces: Emmett’s and that of his mother Mamie Till-Mobley, portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler in a powerfully skilled and undeniably star-making screen performance.
In imagining a way to tell Emmett Till’s story without focusing on the violence and torture the boy suffered, Chukwu, along with co-writers Michael Reilly and Till investigator and filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, focus on his mother, Mamie, whose decision to share her son’s face with the world had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement
In “Till,” Chicago city kid Emmett (Jalyn Hall) is a beloved only son and the embodiment of Black boy joy. He has not grown up with the fear of violent racism as his Mississippi cousins have, and he moves in the world with the comfort and ease that his mother has imbued in him with her love and protection. She shields him from quotidian microaggressions, and her warnings about how to behave with Southern white folks are unfortunately too little too late for the ebullient Emmett, called Bo, or BoBo, by his loved ones. Despite his cousin’s warnings, he pays a white woman (Haley Bennett) an innocent compliment, expecting appreciation for his kindness. What he receives is a brutal death sentence: kidnapped, tortured, shot and dumped.
Chukwu does not visualize this violence for the viewer. We witness Emmett’s kidnapping, and experience his torture briefly, from a distance, muffled noises the only evidence. In “Till,” a film about bearing witness, it is not about conjuring the things that were not seen, but examining the evidence from the witnesses who were there. It’s also not about retraumatizing an audience, but rather, honoring a woman who turned her trauma and loss into meaningful action.
Bearing witness becomes everything for Mamie, who insists her son’s body be delivered to Chicago, who insists he be dressed in his finest, who insists that his broken body be viewed by her family, her community and the entire nation. “We have to look,” she insists.
Chukwu tells “Till” through Mamie’s face, framing Deadwyler’s visage and large, expressive eyes in the tradition of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” In the same way that Dreyer captured actress Maria Falconetti’s face while Joan of Arc withstands her trial, so too does Chukwu capture Mamie’s experience choosing to testify at the trial of her son’s murderers. In a long take, the camera slowly moves around Deadwyler from her profile framed against the white male jury to a close-up as she as she delivers a breathtaking performance of Mamie’s testimony.
Chukwu and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski utilize a variety of camera movements to capture Deadwyler’s performance throughout “Till,” from dolly zooms, to handheld cameras, to long tracking shots. The complex cinematography is coupled with sumptuous visual style, the production design by Curt Beech and costume design by Marci Rodgers nodding to Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas.
In adopting a rich, Sirkian look, Chukwu affords a visual luxury that is often denied to this kind of story, giving it a beauty and significance that it deserves, as Deadwyler glows glamorously in every moment. It also offers the opportunity to the audience to truly take in the images and critically assess their meaning, as Sirk’s films were rife with social critique, his aesthetics extrapolated by filmmakers such as Todd Haynes and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to their own storytelling ends.
Using a variety of filmmaking techniques, Chukwu asks us to look at Deadwyler’s performance as Mamie in many different ways — to study her grief, her herculean poise, the polarity between her power and vulnerability — and to truly understand and feel the enormity of what she accomplished. The result is a true achievement of filmmaking to create an emotional, affecting portrait of a mother and an unlikely civil rights pioneer, and to pay loving tribute to the life and death of Emmett Till.
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‘TILL’
4 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for thematic content involving racism, strong disturbing images and racial slurs)
Running time: 2:10
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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