JUST MERCY: A Conventional Take on a Radical Story

This review made possible by our friends at Galaxy! For more showtimes of JUST MERCY and lots more, visit the Galaxy screenings page.

Rating: ⚖️⚖️⚖️⚖️

[Trailer]

As a high school English teacher, I try to provide texts for my students that feel relevant and address issues that they can relate to, such as racial discrimination. Their summer reading assignment is always Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, a memoir by civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson. It’s a great story, but it’s also full of legal jargon and wandering anecdotes, so few students make it past the first few chapters. While a tough read, it’s an important story, and hopefully with the film release, more of my students will engage with Stevenson’s work. The film pulls out the most important through line and leaves behind the more dense material.

Author Bryan Stevenson and his on-screen counterpart, Michael B. Jordan

Due to my familiarity with the story (I, personally, always complete my summer reading), I was excited to hear that it would be made into a film, but I do admit that I somewhat expected it to get the Green Book treatment, or at least be the type of watered-down social justice film that we all watched after we finished our state testing. The book is so powerful that I wondered if director Destin Daniel Cretton would sanitize it into a heartwarming story of white saviors and warm fuzzies. Thankfully, the film stays true to its source material, and while we do see some on-screen victory, it doesn’t negate the harsh realities that we’re confronted with throughout the 137-minute runtime. 

The strength of the film is in the facts, but similar to the memoir, the pace lulls at times due to the length. The narrative frame follows the book’s, and on the surface level, it’s a pretty standard biopic. However, the film packs an emotional punch; I found myself incredibly moved by the performances, particularly those by Jamie Foxx and Rob Morgan, both representing men who are being held on death row for different crimes and experiencing different types of injustice. Foxx’s character, Walter McMillian, has been falsely accused of murder, and Rob Morgan’s Herbert suffers from post-Vietnam War PTSD without treatment, leading him to mistakenly commit a violent crime. Michael B. Jordon, Brie Larson, and Tim Blake Nelson deliver as well, but it’s those two men that personify the crimes against humanity that persist in our so-called modern society, evoking empathy for people who are so often forgotten in the margins.

While I wish the film had taken some chances — perhaps played with structure, or made bolder choices with the score — what does exist in the film functions. As previously mentioned, there are no white saviors, or even really villains, for that matter. Cretton respects the humanity of each of the characters; each is flawed, complex, and has room for growth, which nods to real-life Stevenson’s outlook on his clients. 

At the end of the day, it’s a crash-course in one of the biggest civil rights failures of our time: the very flawed justice system that is still overwrought with racial discrimination. I do think the story is important, and I think that it plainly lays out just how institutionalized racism really is. You’ll walk away not with warm fuzzies, but with anger. There are some happy endings, but the bigger message remains: we, as a country, are broken. But there’s hope, too. Stevenson’s mantra, that we are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done, could be true for America, if only we start to rethink our definition of justice.