2017’s Academy Award-nominated live-action short subjects included filmmaker Kevin Wilson Jr.’s My Nephew Emmett, which dramatizes Moses Wright’s late-night dread, as he awaits the men who he knows will kill his nephew.
It’s a heart-stoppingly solemn, quietly powerful 20-minute experience.
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| Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall, center) pauses before entering the tiny grocery store, where the next few minutes will forever change his life, and the lives of many, many others. |
(Beauchamp spent 27 years researching Till’s heinous murder, and his research prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to reopen the case in 2004.)
Chukwu draws an absolutely amazing performance from Danielle Deadwyler, cast as Emmett’s loving and protective mother, Mamie. When eventually confronted with what has happened to her 14-year-old son — what he looks like, when she sees his brutally maimed body — Deadwyler summons a degree of anguish, heartbreak and fury that I’d not have thought possible.
This goes far beyond acting; she becomes Mamie Till.
Few film performances achieve the impact of similar work in a live theatrical production, because the screen remains a barrier between us and the actors. But Deadwyler’s breathtaking work here is a rare exception; she unerringly navigates an astonishing range of richly nuanced emotions, as Mamie resolutely embarks on a path she never would have chosen for herself, and often dreads walking.
But that comes later.
Equally impressive is the degree of restraint and dignity with which Chukwu and her writers allow this story to unfold; this must’ve been quite difficult, considering the heinousness of what occurred.
Events begin in Chicago, in the summer of 1955. Mamie is a widowed single mother — her husband died in action, during World War II — who is the head of her household, and (tellingly) the sole Black woman working for the Air Force in this city. She dotes on Emmett (Jalyn Hall), nicknamed “Bobo,” her only child; he’s an irrepressibly cheerful bundle of energy.
Hall’s performance is equally engaging; his handling of Emmett is a blend of enthusiasm and joy, with subtle touches of youthful arrogance. He simply loves life, his gaze forever radiant. (It’s difficult to be certain, as a viewer, if we detect the boy’s somewhat reckless streak on its own, or because we already know that this side of Emmett will prove his undoing.)
Emmett has been invited to visit cousins and his Uncle Moses (John Douglas Thompson), down in Money, a small town in the Mississippi Delta region. Having been born and raised in Chicago, Emmett has no concept of life and the unspoken rules in the Jim Crow-era South; although he listens attentively while his mother repeatedly instructs and cautions about proper (read: safe) behavior, we can tell that he really isn’t paying attention.
Emmett asks, during a final shopping spree, for a new wallet to take on the trip. She obliges; cinematographer Bobby Bukowski’s camera holds, when he returns home, fills the wallet with his meager small change, and impulsively retains the stock photo — of a white woman — in the interior window.
Chukwu and Bukowski deftly work our emotions, throughout this film, with subtle and telling cinematographic decisions. Another comes the next morning, when the camera slowly pulls away from Emmett’s mother, standing on the platform, as his train leaves. The implication is clear.
Once among his Mississippi relations, who earn their living by working cotton fields, Emmett is the reverse of the old cliché: a city mouse who hasn’t the faintest idea how to navigate life in the country.
The crisis hits after work one day, when he and his cousins head to what passes for the center of town. Emmett wanders into a small grocery store, where its white proprietor, Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), eyes him coldly from behind the counter. He reaches into a jar to extract some penny candy; Bryant’s expression tightens, and we know that he already has made a mistake.
Emmett remains oblivious, pays for the candy, and then compounds the felony by talking to her in a way that’s wholly innocent (from any rational person’s point of view), but offensively inappropriate (from hers). And then he makes it even worse.
A few nights later, with Emmett and his cousins in bed, Moses is brought to the door by angry pounding. Bryant’s husband Roy (Sean Michael Weber) and his half-brother J.W. Milam (Eric Whitten), both armed, demand that Moses produce Emmett.
The palpable tension is almost beyond endurance.
Thompson sublimely conveys Moses’ comprehension, terror and impotent frustration; he knows full well that a failure to cooperate could result in the slaughter of everybody in the house. Hall is equally heartbreaking, as the initial confusion and bewilderment in Emmett’s eyes shifts to fear.
Thankfully, what happens soon thereafter takes place off-camera, albeit punctuated by a boy’s shrieks of agony. Which are horrific enough.
What Mamie subsequently does — confronted first with the news, and then, a few days later, with word that her son’s body has been found — is audacious and unbelievably brave. It made her a lightning rod in the blossoming Civil Rights movement.
Sean Patrick Thomas shines as Gene Mobley, a barber courting Mamie as this saga begins, and who soon would become her third husband and steadfast companion until he died in 2000. Here he’s the rock against which Mamie leans, at her lowest moments.
Roger Guenveur Smith is the epitome of dignity as Dr. T.R.M. Howard, who becomes an early ally and invaluable resource for Mamie; Tosin Cole brings passion, intelligence and shrewd perception to his role as Medgar Evers, soon to become another key Civil Rights icon.
Frankie Faison is excellent in a telling role as John Carthan, Mamie’s estranged father, who abandoned his family and re-married years earlier. We catch this man in the midst of transition; there’s a sense that he’s already attempting to mend fences, and this crisis gives him an opportunity to step up, and atone for past mistakes. Faison’s earnest performance is heartwarming.
I’m less satisfied with Whoopi Goldberg’s portrayal of Mamie’s mother. Unlike all the other actors in this film, who fully inhabit their roles, Goldberg can’t seem to escape being … well … herself.
On the other hand, Bennett’s performance as Carolyn Bryant is sublime … and the stuff of nightmares. In a way, this woman’s tight-lipped, judgmental, insufferably condescending and viciously racist behavior is even worse than that of the men who defile and kill Emmett; after all, she sends them.
Each time you think we’ve seen the worst of Carolyn, she descends even further into the well of pure, unrestrained Evil.
Chukwu and editor Ron Patane amplify these excellent performances with a telling manipulation of music and ambient sounds, the latter occasionally silenced for dramatic impact. Abel Korzeniowski’s stirring score often plays to the subtler aspect of a given scene, rather than shadow what seems obvious: as when Mamie first sees her son’s body, and the music augments not her pain — so obvious in Deadwyler’s shattered expression and body language — but her rising anger and resolve to do something.
When the screen goes black after the story’s final frustrating scenes, several text blocks supply essential “what happened next” information. None is more infuriating than what Look magazine published in January 1956, which to this day remains a blistering indictment of “justice” in the Jim Crow South.
You’ll not soon forget this film, which is guaranteed multiple Academy Awards early next year.
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