Chinonye Chukwu directs the hell out of the conventional screenplay she’s been given in “Till.” The movie wouldn’t have worked in many hands, but through her caring direction, and a landmark performance from Danielle Deadwyler, it does.
Based on a true story, “Till” is all about emotions. In 1955, a Chicago mother, Deadwyler’s Mamie Till, reluctantly sends her son Emmett to visit his cousins in the black-hating swamps of Mississippi. He ends up getting murdered for whistling at a white woman.
Mamie’s grief is profound and brings out the activist in her. She would eventually become a civil rights icon in her persistent fight for her son’s good name. Deadwyler brings passion and nuance to a role that feels overwritten on the page. There’s subtlety to her work here that feels fully fleshed, not one note is rung false.
The film’s first half feels tense and strongly rendered, you know the inevitable is coming, and there’s dread in knowing this son of hers will be gruesomely killed by Mississippi hicks. Once she demands to see the disfigured and thoroughly scarred body at the morgue, a scene of shattering silence occurs. No words are spoken, just Mamie and Deadwyler’s tragic response.
The ensuing drama in the second half surrounds the show trial of Emmett’s killers, but also the racial vibes of a toxic Mississippi feeling in hate. If you already know about this true story then you surely know the outcome, but Chukwu and Deadwyler hold it all together.
Chukwu’s overuse of the violin-tinged score, not to mention Emmett’s ghost visiting Mamie, is a bit too much, however her framing is second-to-none. Here is a talented and relatively new filmmaker who turned heads with her confident 2019 debut, “Clemency.” In “Till” she manages to turn the conventional into something fresh, and Deadwyler, a star-in-the-making, crushes you. [B]