It's one of the most confronting photographs in American history.
The bloated and scarred corpse of 14-year-old Emmett Till – a Black teen who was abducted, beaten, shot in the head and dumped in a Mississippi river in 1955 by two white men – is laid out in front of his mother, her head turned in grief while her partner stares down the lens, his expression a mixture of sadness and accusation.
The picture, which shocked a nation when it appeared in Jet magazine in September 1955, appears midway through the new biographical drama Till, though not quite accurately. A little cinematic sleight of hand reframes it as the cover image for the Black culture masthead, elevating the shot from the publication's inside pages to emphasise its impact on the burgeoning civil rights movement of the time.
Nigerian American director Chinonye Chukwu's film, which stars Danielle Deadwyler as Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, takes this grisly, if hardly atypical, incident of race hate as the basis for an earnest, impassioned drama, as a family's grief becomes a political flashpoint.
Mamie is a war widow working a desk job for the air force in Chicago, where she lives with her bright and lively only child Emmett (Jalyn Hall), who she's nicknamed "Bobo", and her new partner, local barber Gene (Sean Patrick Thomas). It's August 1955, and Emmett is due to visit his cousins for a short stay in Money, Mississippi – a trip that's causing Mamie understandable anxiety, given the South's ongoing racial segregation and the open hostility of many white people toward their Black neighbours.
"I don't want him seeing himself the way those people are seen down there," Mamie worries to her mother, Alma (Whoopi Goldberg, also one of the film's producers), who grew up in Mississippi.
Mamie warns Emmett: "You have to be extra careful with white people." As his train departs, the camera dramatically pushes in on his mother, as though she was possessed of some historical premonition.
Treated to a communal welcome in Money by his uncle, Moses "Preacher" Wright (John Douglas Thompson), and his teenage cousins, Emmett is an exuberant kid with an outgoing, big-city personality – which spells trouble when he innocently compliments a white grocery store clerk, Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), on her movie star looks, and gives her an admiring whistle.
Later that night, her husband (Sean Michael Weber) and his half-brother (Eric Whitten) force themselves into Preacher's home, hold the family at gunpoint, and drag Emmett off into the night, his horrific fate – which the film wisely, and sensitively, elides – all but sealed.
Chukwu, who won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Clemency (2019), collaborated on a script by Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp (director of the 2005 documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till). Though crafted with care and restraint, the resulting film – told as an old-fashioned movie drama – can sometimes feel a little too neat for the traumatic subject matter, which proves resistant to the straightforward Hollywood playbook.
Among the film's more obvious flaws is its truly dreadful score, maudlin string pieces that insistently, needlessly prod the audience, and worse, routinely smother many of the actors' performances. Meanwhile, some of Chukwu's directorial choices, while clearly well-intentioned, can work to undermine the dramatic power of key moments.
When the news of Emmett's death reaches his mother, the director leans gently on the so-called Vertigo Effect – a strange choice of filmic trope – to evoke Mamie's mounting shock, before having Deadwyler crumple to the floor with a dramatic piano thud. The scene is affecting – how could it not be – but its delivery approaches TV-movie camp.
Later, asked by reporters about the stench coming from the morgue, Mamie's reply – "That smell is my son's body. He came home to me reeking of racial hatred" – is a line so corny it could only exist in a Hollywood dramatisation.
It's a credit to Deadwyler that she rises above these occasional trite elements, wringing emotion from moments that can feel overly staged. (Mamie's breakdown upon seeing her son's coffin is devastating in Deadwyler's delivery, even when the scene itself is awkward.) The actor, whose omission from the Oscar nominations was the source of some controversy, gives a genuinely moving performance, particularly once the film hits its classic courtroom-drama stride.
In these sequences, where the film finally gives her the space to breathe, Deadwyler fully captures her character's resolve, her body electrified both by personal grief and the burden of having her pain become the face of a political movement.
Approached by the NAACP to use Emmett's death as a rallying point in the battle for civil rights, Mamie makes the brave and ultimately watershed decision to allow her son's corpse to be photographed by the press, and then to be viewed in an open-casket funeral – effectively putting a face to race hate that is hard to ignore.
"No one's gonna believe what I just saw," she says after viewing her son's nearly unrecognisable body. "They have to see it for themselves."
Even with the two men indicted on murder charges, the film's courtroom scenes demonstrate just how much the prosecution is up against: an all-white jury of old men, a sheriff who brazenly accuses Mamie and the NAACP of staging Emmett's death to get attention for their cause, and a key witness – Carolyn Bryant, grotesquely playing victim – who straight up lies under oath.
Given the circumstances, the 'not guilty' verdict is almost inevitable.
In one of Till's most striking – and tellingly, more unusual – touches, Chukwu holds for a beat on Mamie's reflection against a moonlit window, her face doubled and distorted by the glass in a way that appears to fuse mother and son into a mask of quiet sorrow.
In that moment, it's not a stretch to imagine Mamie is staring across time – to the footage of Rodney King, of George Floyd; to every other image of Black Americans brutalised at the hands of race hate.
For all its obvious Hollywood flaws, Till is a vital reminder of what's at stake. As the film's end-title cards remind us, it wasn't until 2022 – 67 years later – that the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was actually signed into law.
Till is in cinemas now.
