"Till". Curzon Westgate.

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website.

For a crime as despicable, sickening and inhuman as lynching, it has resulted in some astonishingly powerful, moving, and even occasionally beautiful, works of art: Abel Meeropol’s 1937 poem Strange Fruit, and its hauntingly lyrical 1939 embodiment by Billie Holiday; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; 1947’s guilt-ridden Western The Ox-Bow Incident. Even EC Comics addressed lynching head-on in their 1953 story The Guilty. Most relevant to this film, there was Bob Dylan’s hastily-penned protest, The Death of Emmett Till.

What unites all of these poems, songs, books, movies and comics is their passion and their dignity, their urgent need for change, to stop a practice which, although illegal, was still carried out with impunity in America’s deep south. Dylan sang, If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust, Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust.

Now lynching is (officially) a thing of the past. But the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson and so many other black people in recent times, at the hands of US police officers who should be protecting them not killing them, has shown that the problem has not gone away. It’s just changed its face.

This is the world into which Till has arrived. Does it confront this new relevance, or does it take refuge in the comparative safety of a vanished past? Read on…

It’s a true story, and it’s well known. But briefly:

Emmett Till was the only child of Mamie Till-Mobley. He was brought up in Chicago, but during a visit to relatives in Mississippi in 1955, at the age of 14, he spoke flirtatiously to one Carolyn Bryant, the white proprietor of a grocery store. Her husband Roy and his half-brother John later turned up at Emmett’s house, kidnapped him, tortured him, shot him, and dropped his body in the river. His mother Mamie insisted on displaying Emmett’s mutilated body to the world, and bravely went to Mississippi to give evidence in the trial against the two murderers. The prejudiced, all-white jury acquitted the two men (who later confessed but were never imprisoned). Mamie’s work to raise awareness of the racial inequality in US society was ground-breaking, and thanks to her, Emmett posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

Till tells this tragic story with respect, compassion and historical accuracy. Director Chinonye Chukwu expertly brings out the fear in the black population of Mississippi, the spiteful derision of the white supremacists, the dignity of Mamie, and the innocence of her son. Some scenes truly made me twist with anger and horror: the sight of the black passengers on the southbound train moving obediently to the rear carriage, the court officer snidely suggesting that black people can’t read – and of course the central scene in the grocery store, pregnant with terror and suspense.

But all of these scenes felt like what they were: historical drama; reconstructions of scenes from the past. Like the recent Bill Nighy film Living, Till neatly avoids the contemporary relevance that is there waiting to be exploited.

And let me tell you, I am a cryer. I often bawl my eyes out in movies. The mere sight of Mr Banks walking to his office to get sacked reduces me to tears. But (unlike lots of the characters) I didn’t cry in Till – at least, not until the on-screen text info at the very end about what happened in the succeeding years. And there’s something wrong if a film’s emotional impact only comes in the credits.

Danielle Deadwyler as Mamie undoubtedly gives a powerhouse performance (and she deserves to be recognised at Oscar time). She conveys heartache and determination in equal degree as she gradually transforms from grieving mother to committed campaigner. But there were too many scenes of her summoning up her strength or telling people how a mother feels. Every time they were about to get into the issues properly, they chose to display emotion instead. Also, I couldn’t help feeling that there was a missed opportunity to show where Mamie went and what she achieved in the years after her son’s death. I felt slightly short-changed that Till chose only to depict the story we either know or could easily predict. It was like a Wikipedia page turned into a film.

Leaving the cinema I was really split by this film. On the one hand I felt it was a finely judged depiction of a story that everyone needs to know, which avoided ‘trauma porn’ and retained humanity. On the other, I could almost tangibly sense the presence of a roomful of white, male movie executives agreeing that making this sort of film was exactly what they need to be doing at this time, and steering it gently away from areas of true, incendiary relevance – don’t want to upset the authorities too much, do we? In other words, it was either a heartfelt historical drama or a cynical piece of studio virtue-signalling – and in the end, I suspect it was both.