McConaugheMay Day 11: A Time to Kill
Have a hazy memory of watching this in middle school for some reason?? I feel like it was for history class or something which would have been a frankly bizarre choice for a teacher to make. This is technically a period piece in that it takes place in the ‘80s, but considering its release in the ‘90s, it’s not much of one. Certainly not enough so as to propel it in into the period piece curse that McConaughey seems to suffer from. The plot concerns the gruesome sexual assault of a young Black girl in Mississippi and the subsequent murder of her assaulters by her father (played by Samuel Jackson). McConaughey stars as the hotshot young lawyer called first by a desire for fame, and then eventually for justice, to defend Jackson’s character. This was the movie that propelled him out of his character roles and bit parts and into full-on movie star status alongside powerhouse co-stars like Sandra Bullock and Donald Sutherland. But has the movie aged well? In short, no.
The big problem here is screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who would be my pick for worst writer with the most amount of success and his script is absolutely terrible. Goldsman makes some utterly baffling choices like having a heroic KKK guy with a Mickey Mouse tattoo (???), briefly subtextually comparing the NAACP intervening in the court case to the KKK planning violence (???), along with a closing summation delivered by McConaughey that’s just grotesque details about the opening scene attack before ending with, “now imagine she’s white.”
Good performances can briefly help you forget that, like when Sandra Bullock manages to charm with her manic pixie dream lawyer exposition or Samuel Jackson calling McConaughey racist, but this is a movie that uses a dead dog to make it clear how out of control the KKK are before then having the dog show up in the next scene alive and well. If you’re gonna need a dead dog to motivate the audience to hate racists (???), you should at least have the conviction to kill the dog.
Director Joel Schumacher seems to do his best with the material, but as a filmmaker best known (and appreciated) for his goofier offerings like The Lost Boys or Batman and Robin, he seems to falter when deciding how to portray any of the characters in conflict with one another. It ends up feeling extremely centrist, with both the KKK and the NAACP standing as opposite ends of a horseshoe, which is about as patently offensive as one can imagine from a movie like this.
McConaughey himself is most convincing in this as a rookie lawyer excited to get on TV and win praise for doing the right thing before quickly revealing that his crusade is almost entirely self-motivated, a shallow excuse to justify his own narcissism. Less good when the movie tries to have its cake too by having him realize that only a white woke lawyer can save the day.
The film is based on a novel by the same name by John Grisham, who was a novelist extremely popular (in my experience) with dads. My own dad showed me The Firm and had me read a few of his books, which makes me wonder: Who’s the current dad novelist?