Movie Review: Till (content warning: disturbing descriptions of racism)

I just finished the movie Till. To be honest I am still processing it since it was a very hard film to watch but I am going to do my best to write as much as I can about the movie. I got it from the library because I heard it got a lot of great reviews and Ariana DeBose, the actress from West Side Story, gave a shoutout to Danielle Deadwyler while singing a medley of “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves” and “We Are Family” at the BAFTA awards. (Side note: Danielle’s face when Ariana gave the shoutout was priceless.)

So now on to the movie. The film opens up in the 1950s in Chicago, Illinois, and Mamie Till-Mobley and her 14-year old son, Emmett, are driving through the city listening to the radio and singing. However, within a few moments of seeing them singing, Mamie’s face suddenly gets serious and the radio music is overshadowed by suspenseful music and if you know about what happened to Emmett Till, you know she has a sense that something bad is going to happen to her son. In fact, leading up to Emmett’s brutal lynching, the camera forces you to sit with Mamie’s deepening anxiety about her son going to visit his cousins in Mississippi. She warns Emmett that he needs to be careful because the South is known for lynching Black people and his life as a young Black man is basically in jeopardy if he goes down there. But he doesn’t take her seriously and says that he knows he needs to be careful. He goes down to see his cousins and they have to work in the cotton fields as sharecroppers. When Emmett makes jokes and goofs off while they are working, his cousins get upset with him and tell him that he is going to get them in trouble with the white people that they work for, but Emmett doesn’t take them seriously. Unfortunately, Emmett sees the ugly side of this Deep South racism when he goes to a corner store for some candy with his cousins. He browses the store and then goes up to the counter and sees a white lady named Carolyn Bryant working at the counter. He grabs some candy out of the jar and he then tells the lady that she looks like a movie star and pulls out a photo of a white lady and shows her. Emmett’s cousins realize that none of them are watching Emmett, so one of them goes into the store and sees him talking to the white woman, and he’s thinking, I need to get Emmett out of here because he is not supposed to be doing that in this part of town, so he The white lady is offended and then when she comes out of the store, before leaving, Emmett smiles and whistles at her. She grabs a pistol and runs after them, and Emmett and his cousins race into their truck and run off as she stands with the pistol pointing at them. When they get home, his cousins’ parents are up late worried about what happened to them, but then they arrive home and Emmett is laughing and talking about how much fun he had. The dad tells him to be careful and Emmett tells him he knows, and then one of the cousins, while on another night out on the town, is angry at Emmett and tells him that he can’t get off from that incident scot-free and that the white folks are going to go after him and them. Emmett tells them it was just one time and that he would be careful next time.

Meanwhile, while all this is going on, Mamie is worried about her son and has a feeling that something dangerous is going to happen to him. And she has every reason to worry, not just because she is Emmett’s mom but because he is a young Black man in 1950s Mississippi and so his life is pretty much at risk simply because of how white people treated Black people down there. She tells her partner, Gene, that she needs to have a night out with the ladies to get her worries about her son off of her mind, and he agrees, so she takes time away to spend time with her friends, playing cards with them and smoking and chit-chatting. However, her sense of calm quickly disappears and she finds herself once again worrying about Emmett and sensing there is something not okay with him. Unfortunately, she is right. Things are not going great during Emmett’s trip, and the husband of the white lady Emmett was talking with at the corner store comes to Uncle Mose’s house and searches the house for Emmett and the white men take away Emmett. When Uncle Mose tells the men to leave Emmett alone, they threaten to shoot him. While we don’t see the actual brutal lynching of Emmett, we see several men, including some Black men who work for the Bryants, drag Emmett into the truck and we hear Emmett’s screams as the men brutally murder him.

The movie in general was hard to watch, but I think the hardest part was seeing the scene where Mamie goes to see her son’s mutilated body after it was found dumped in the river. The camera does it to where we don’t see the body immediately, but it goes up from under the table to where we can see the body during the autopsy . And man, it is brutal to watch this scene. I had studied about Emmett Till in my U.S. history classes, but when I actually saw Emmett’s mutilated bloated face and entire body on the screen it showed me how brutal his lynching really was and also how fucked up Jim Crow and the legacy of racism was and still is. It reminded me of when George Zimmerman, a police officer, shot and killed a young Black man named Trayvon Martin, who was just going into the store and living his life. Young Black men don’t get to live and enjoy their lives because white America is constantly policing their bodies, and that is how it has been for centuries, even dating back to enslavement. There is a scene in the film where Mamie tells Emmett that when he is down in Mississippi he needs to “be small,” meaning that he has to act servile towards white people and can’t be his confident joyful self because white people just can’t stand seeing a young confident Black man being himself. When Black people resisted the policing of their bodies and experienced freedom and joy, it threatened the idea of safety for many white people and the system of injustice and so instead of letting Black men experience Black joy they did everything in their power to squash that Black joy, including robbing them of life. In the wake of Trayvon being killed, I remember doing a class video project and one of my classmates make a joke about Trayvon Martin and I remember being pretty upset but I was also a coward at the time and was too afraid to say anything because I didn’t want to be pegged as this angry Black woman. I really wish I had spoken up though because Travyon’s murder was not something to joke about. I have become much more hyperaware of how ugly this racism is especially after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black people in America. In the film, Mamie wants everyone to see Emmett’s body in the open casket because she knows that no one will take his lynching seriously if they don’t see the damage that these men did to his body. Seeing Mamie crying over her son’s body on the autopsy table gave me chills, but I had to see this because many times when I was watching historical movies like The Butler and they briefly showed Emmett Till’s body, I would look away or not want to see it. But they portray it for what it was in this movie, and there was no way they could sugarcoat how fucked up the lynching of Emmett Till was, so I had to see it for what it was. I remember when George Floyd got murdered and Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, sat on his neck for about eight minutes. A young woman outside the store videotaped the entire lynching on her phone, and it circled across the internet. Many people, including white people, were shocked and disgusted, and as a Black person, it wasn’t new for me because I had seen countless news articles by this point about people who look like me being brutally murdered at the hands of police. But for many people, they had not seen or learned about police brutality, so for them it was painful to see a human being devalue the life of another human being simply because he was Black. And sure, some people argue that oh, Those Black kids were just walking the wrong way or They were talking too loudly. But that doesn’t mean what Derek Chauvin did was in any way right. He literally took someone else’s life when he didn’t have to. I think had the young woman not videotaped the murder on her phone, I don’t think anyone would have seen how painful and traumatic George Floyd’s murder was. At Emmett’s funeral, the attendees walk past Emmett’s corpse and are deeply pained but they see how brutally he was lynched.

I thought about stopping the film shortly after that, but I had to keep going because the acting was just so damn good. The rest of the movie shows how Mamie works with the NAACP to investigate the lynching of Emmett and the pain and trauma she has to grapple with throughout the trial. Gene doesn’t want her to go to Mississippi alone, but she insists that she needs to go because she needs to bring justice to her son and make J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the two white men who lynched Emmett, pay for what they did. As predicted, Milam and Bryant got off scot-free and so did Roy’s wife, Carolyn. Carolyn lied while giving her testimony. She says that Emmett raped her behind the store and that he had been with white girls before, but Mamie clearly sees through this white woman’s bullshit, and so she leaves the courthouse and says she is going home to Chicago because she knows that these white people are going to get off scot-free and that the verdict is going to be that these white men were not guilty of killing Emmett. She speaks at an NAACP rally in Harlem about how the U.S. government and the Mississippi court stood idly by and did nothing to prosecute the white men who killed her son. She returns home though and remembers the life of her son, and when the movie ended I didn’t cry but I was just filled with a deep sense of anger that these men got to go off scot-free while Mamie had to deal with the grief of losing her son to a brutal lynching for the rest of her life. I had to remember though that what happened to Emmett was not an isolated incident. In my intro to Black culture class, we had an unit on the lynching of Black people in the United States, and we had to read an excerpt from a book (I cannot remember the title and frankly the excerpt is still seared into my memory, so I don’t know if I have the stomach to revisit it again) where they detailed the lynchings of Black people in graphic detail. I don’t think I slept well that night of course because all I could think about was that reading. But the reading showed me once again how dehumanizing this system of racism was to Black people and how we need to learn about it because unfortunately, the U.S.’s history was founded on ideals of freedom and justice, but in reality that freedom and justice was not granted to all people, namely Black and Indigenous peoples.

After watching this film I thought about this book I read called The New Human Revolution. In the book Daisaku Ikeda is traveling to the United States in the 1960s and he sees a young Black boy watching a group of white boys playing a game in the park and they exclude this boy because he is Black. When one of the children loses, the Black boy starts cheering and laughing. There is an older white gentleman watching the game and he cheers on the white boys, but when the Black boy started cheering, he runs up to him and started yelling at him. The boy ran away feeling rightfully angry and hurt, and Daisaku Ikeda makes a promise in his heart to the Black boy that he will build a world where this boy feels respected and loved for who he is and not looked down upon for the color of his skin. This scene really moved me because it reminded me that while the U.S. and many parts of the world have an ugly legacy of racism, I can’t give up hope. That doesn’t mean I need to be overly optimistic or simply wish away centuries of slavery, bloodshed and genocide, but I can look at reality but also envision a more hopeful future where people can respect the inherent dignity of each person’s life, and in particular the lives of the marginalized.

Even though this movie wasn’t easy to sit through, the acting is absolutely incredible. Danielle Deadwyler played Mamie Till-Mobley so well, and you can just see Mamie’s raw pain and emotion that just reverberates through her entire being when she loses her son and how she grapples with her loss and also a fucked up system of dehumanizing Black people’s lives. I got goosebumps during the end credits because they feature this powerful song by Jazmine Sullivan called “Stand Up.” I didn’t get out of my chair. I just had to sit there and process the entire experience of watching such a powerful film.

Till. 2022. 2 hr 10 min. Rated PG-13 for thematic content involving racism, strong disturbing images and racial slurs.