From the first scene, Till is haunted by grief. 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) is in the front seat of a car with his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler). The camera pans up and around the smiling couple – director Chinonye Chukwu’s camera often circles Mamie, the center of a universe of loss – as a happy ’50s song blares out of the radio. They laugh along, then the music turns sour and distorted like in a horror movie, the sound distorted with future sadness. It’s 1955, weeks before Emmett was murdered by two white men in Mississippi, and this memory will be one of my last.
Till is also haunted by another haunting: the specter of black pain molded into entertainment, art made from the trauma of American anti-blackness. The film, written by Chukwu, Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp, was haunted by a questionable premise from the start. What does this reliving of Emmett Till’s brutal murder and Mamie’s subsequent activism do? For whom do we conjure up the unimaginable pain of past spirits?
Till steadfastly seeks to educate and honor rather than exploit, but does not run away from these issues; it never completely dispels the caution about its premise. Given the weight of Till’s lynching in the American public imagination, the visceral horror of his death, or the continued use of his story as a history lesson for whites, it probably never could. The 2-hour, 10-minute film occasionally proves educational for white audiences — an unnamed appearance by Medgar Evers (Tosin Cole) telling Mamie, “Just call me Medgar”; Pre-credit slides explaining the assassination and legacy of Evers and the passage of the Emmett-Till anti-lynching law in 2022.
Many of the film’s storylines mirror those of the show Women of the Movement, an ABC anthology series whose first season, which released this spring, also focused on Mamie Till’s life as a civil rights activist. Till is the better version as an artwork – more confident, more focused, with impressive stylistic choices and the prestige look of a better budget. Chukwu, a Nigerian, has created a sensitive, painful film, careful not to indulge in physical trauma and attuned to Mamie’s inwardness, an echo of Chukwu’s sublime 2019 drama Clemency. Deadwyler, eyes perpetually tearing, delivers remarkable performance that, despite numerous pitfalls, never descends into melodrama. Till is arguably the best-case scenario of a dubious decision designed to essentially turn the story of Mamie Till into a biopic – a woman’s tragic transformation into an activist, a celebrity of grief and American racial hatred.
As such, Till hits the expected notes: ponderous music, scenes depicting the advance of fame, a final triumphant moment of transformation; a few scenes each to structure their relationships with mother Alma (Whoopi Goldberg) and her staunch partner Gene (Sean Patrick Thomas), both of whom receive little characterization beyond Mamie’s support. There is also cinematic rendering of textbook details. Mamie provides Emmett with “a different set of rules for Negroes down there.” There’s that moment on the train from Chicago to Mississippi as black passengers board the back of the train, the wide shot of fields dotted with white cotton and black sharecroppers. The moment Emmett, played by Hall as preternaturally cute and naïve, whistles on white shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett); the moment her husband Roy Bryant and JW Milam get Emmett out of his bed. The moment Mamie let reporters show her son’s mutilated body because “the whole world needs to see what happened to my son.”
Danielle Deadwyler and Whoopi Goldberg. Photo: Lynsey Weatherspoon/APChukwu promised viewers that her film would refrain from depicting physical violence — “I’m not interested in enjoying that kind of physical trauma,” she said in a featurette posted to YouTube — and it’s true that we Emmetts not see assassination. We hear some of it – cries of pain from a barn in the night, the crack of a whip. And while it initially appears viewers will be spared, we see the horrifying aftermath. We watch as Mamie touches Emmett’s wet ankles, his knee, his stomach, his face mutilated beyond recognition. Mocking Emmett’s body is a difficult decision, one that I’m honestly not sure how to judge. It’s disgusting to look at, but the act of looking, of not looking away, was Mamie’s heroic defiance, the trigger of a movement.
Till is most effective and revealing when he depicts how Mamie’s only son became a public figure in death, her grief a national symbol. There are cameras clicking as she wails over her son’s coffin, a shot that expands from a lone mourner at his funeral to a crowd. Chukwu and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski often capture Deadwyler in mirrors and windows, never less than compellingly, their image being reproduced, shattered, reflected. It’s moving into trickier territory where the ethics aren’t as strong — the pressure exerted on Mamie to publicly show her grief, from NAACP members who have rightly identified a rare window for attention, or the heartbreaking confrontation between Mamie and the uncle who chose to protect his family because they fought the men who kidnapped Emmett.
But despite all obvious care, Till cannot shake off the questions: for whom, why. Looking at it, I could imagine Till playing for classrooms of mostly white American students, telling important stories seriously, portraying real people with sensitivity. There is a purpose in that. It’s as noble an implementation of tragic historical record as one could hope to find within the confines of a biopic – neither an acknowledgment of the doubters nor sufficient justification for reliving it.