'Till' review: Engrossing drama about a mother seeking justice

Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old Black boy beaten to death for allegedly whistling at a white woman at a Mississippi grocery store in 1955, is not one of the Civil Rights Era’s feel-good stories. Justice was not served in the case, nor was public opinion decisively swayed by the headlines. The 1960s, when Black Americans finally began making some gains toward equality, came too late for the Till family.

Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till” nevertheless finds inspiration in the tragedy by focusing on Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Played by Danielle Deadwyler, Mamie undergoes a grueling transformation — first a comfortable middle-class Chicagoan (Emmett was visiting family in the South when he was killed), then a devastated mother, then a public crusader. Whoopi Goldberg, as Mamie’s mother (she’s also a producer here), may be the most famous name in this movie, but that’s probably about to change: Deadwyler, a little-known actor from Georgia, gives the kind of note-perfect performance you’d expect from an established star.

“Till” doesn’t show us the murder; it’s harrowing enough to watch a child dragged out of his bed by an armed lynch mob. “Till” does, however, show the maimed and bloated body of the once-sprightly Emmett (Jalyn Hall), which Mamie in turn showed the world by holding a funeral with an open casket. “Nobody’s going to believe what I just saw,” Mamie says. “No, they have to see it for themselves.” Shocking photographs of the funeral, published by Black news outlets, are one reason the Till case became national news.

Chukwu, who co-wrote the screenplay, is a nuanced storyteller. In her 2019 drama “Clemency,” featuring  Alfre Woodard as a prison warden dreading her next execution, Chukwu avoided sudden epiphanies and dramatic turnabouts. Likewise, in “Till,” Mamie never fully embraces her role as Black icon. She slightly distrusts slick activists like Rayfield Mooty (Kevin Carroll), though she takes a shine to an idealistic young Medgar Evers (Tosin Cole). Mamie isn’t a grandstander. She’s just a mom. Her most galvanizing moment comes during the trial, when a lawyer asks whether she’s sure that disfigured body was her son’s. “A mother knows,” she tells the all-white jury. “Your mother would know.”

Most films about the Civil Rights Era tend to focus on triumphal moments and new dawns. Not this one. In “Till,” Black tears have little effect on white characters. Not even Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), the offended white woman — herself a mother — can muster any pity for the grieving Mamie. “Till” is a portrait of a woman fighting for justice at a time when the dawn must have seemed very far away.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com