Drive around Chicago enough and you’ll likely catch sight of a video billboard flashing momentarily on “Till.” Its image of the actors playing Emmett Till and, more prominently and in color, Mamie Till-Mobley, hang in place for a few seconds before being replaced by something else.
An ad, like any other. Yet with “Till,” the here-and-gone implications feel different, and bittersweet. The movie isn’t perfect, and some of it runs into conventional biopic trappings. But the best of it, in careful, watchful scenes you don’t expect, delves deeply and authentically into human grief, and human resolve.
The movie deserves to stay around, and to be seen — not because it’s nobly intentioned (it is) or infuriatingly pertinent (it is, given the sneak attack on Black voting rights, for starters). It’s worth seeing because a distinctive and intuitive filmmaker, co-writer and director Chinonye Chukwu, made it, and because of Danielle Deadwyler’s portrayal of Mamie. Earlier this year Congress passed an anti-lynching bill bearing Emmett Till’s name, making lynching a federal hate crime. Till’s killers never paid the price for what they did. In movie terms, this means Mamie’s day in court cannot give an audience what it is used to getting: justice, neat and tidy.
“Till” spans the before, during and the after of the Emmett Till lynching, covering a few months in the activist awakening in an ordinary Chicago woman who became extraordinary. Chukwu wrote “Till” using elements of an earlier screenplay by her credited co-writers Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp. You know you’re in sure directorial hands in the opening scene: With the Moonglows’ version of the Chess Records recording of “Sincerely” on the car radio, Mamie (Deadwyler) and Emmett (Jalyn Hall) sing along, make each other laugh, gaze out the window.
Emmett’s looking forward to his journey from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta, where the Tills’ cousins live. The camera stays on Mamie for a bit. Slowly her smile turns cooler, an undercurrent of worry in her eyes. She knows her bright, brash, fun-loving son will not be viewed kindly by the white establishment in the Jim Crow South. She fears the worst for him; we already know his fate.
But this moment in the car needs no underlining and director Chukwu knows it, too. There’s no cut to an editorializing close-up indicating her dread, no music cue to overstate the feeling. It’s all Deadwyler, going through a series of subtly delineated feelings without words, and it feels authentically imagined and real.
“Be small down there,” she warns him later. He shrugs off the suggestion, turning it into a joke. It’s akin to the line in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” currently back on Broadway, when a mother reminds her 11-year-old daughter heading off to school: “Don’t act your color.”
Once he’s there, the beaten-down averted glances of his relatives, in the presence of every white person in the Mississippi town, make Emmett a vulnerable outlier. Buying candy at a white-run general store, he makes the mistake of wolf-whistling at the woman, Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), working there. His future is sealed at that moment, and Emmett’s Mississippi cousins know it.
The film takes us through Emmett’s abduction, torture and murder. But in this recounting of the Emmett Till tragedy, it is Mamie’s process of unthinkable discovery and eventual, awakening activism that steers the story.
Quietly stunning scenes emerge throughout. In one, Mamie identifies the bloated, ravaged body of her son. The scene is not glossed over, nor treated as crude audience manipulation: We see just enough of what Mamie sees. In Deadwyler’s unerring hands, the shock, the tenderness and the tears burn clean and true.
Later in “Till,” on the witness stand with Till’s killers on trial, Deadwyler centers an equally striking seven-minute close-up, in one sustained shot. Chukwu keeps the camera on Deadwyler as Mamie offers her testimony, her face a canvas of flickering realizations that these men will not suffer for their crimes. The movie is full of strong ensemble work, with Whoopi Goldberg (a producer on the project) low-key excellent as Emmett’s grandmother; Tosin Cole, sturdy and effective as civil rights leader Medgar Evers; and many others. But Deadwyler is the through-line.
“Till” rushes a bit in the sections dramatizing Mamie’s transformation from relatively apolitical Chicagoan to an urgently engaged citizen of a wider world. The movie could use another 10 or 15 minutes to amplify that shift. Some of the scenes are more conventional than others. But Chukwu, whose previous drama, “Clemency,” worked similarly confident small miracles, has a gorgeous sense of focus, and sound (she loves silence juxtaposed against raw anguish). She knows the value of letting the audience go through trials of fire, moment to moment, with the people on screen.
“Till” opens in multiplexes this week. Theaters have been struggling, for years now, faced with moviestaying vs. moviegoing audience habits that were shaky even before the pandemic. All I can tell you is this: It’s more than movie enough to justify the theatrical experience.
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‘TILL’
3.5 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: Premieres Thursday Oct. 13 in theaters
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