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.
