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.
