By any measure, Bryan Stevenson is a remarkable man: A Harvard-educated lawyer, he's devoted his 30-plus-year career to fighting for social justice and legal reform for the poor, the disenfranchised, and the wrongly convicted, including those sentenced to execution.
The new movie about him, on the other hand, is nothing that radical. Just Mercy follows the activist movie formula with few major missteps, but also precious few surprises.
Michael B. Jordan leads the cast as a young Bryan, recently out of law school and newly arrived in Alabama to start the (still active) Equal Justice Initiative. In his first visit to the local prison, Bryan meets a death-row inmate named Walter "Johnny D." McMillian (Jamie Foxx), who was convicted of murdering a white woman based on flimsy eyewitness testimony, and makes it his mission to set things right for McMillian and others like him.
Even fictional superheroes tend to get more shading than Bryan does here.
Just Mercy does not shy away from the unbalanced horrors of the American justice system, or the overwhelming and frequently dangerous forces keeping this system in place. We see all too well how racism makes black men like McMillian "guilty from the moment you're born," as he puts it, and allows white people the illusion of security at the expense of black lives. We hear horror stories of bigoted cops and corrupt officials and incompetent defense attorneys, and watch as Bryan himself is humiliated, harassed, and threatened on the job. He even bears witness to the execution of a Vietnam vet with PTSD (Rob Morgan, heartbreaking).
But Just Mercy is a film about hope, not despair, and director Daniel Destin Cretton balances these harsh truths with moments of humor and grace. He backs away to allow a character a measure of privacy and dignity in the last minutes before his execution, or stays on an EJI colleague (Brie Larson) as she moves past a bomb scare with a shaky but determined smirk. ("Maybe they'll stop trying to kill us once they realize how charming we are," she quips to Bryan.)
As a character, Bryan is defined by his extreme empathy. He makes an effort to see everyone around him as a person, resisting the temptation to cast them into easy roles like hero or villain, victim or perpetrator, and it's disarming enough to win over even some of his doubters. If Bryan is a
"real-life superhero," as Jordan described him in a post-screening Q&A, this is his superpower.
One only wishes the film had such insight into its own characters — they're too rarely allowed to come across as flawed, complicated, or even particularly unique. Even fictional superheroes tend to get more shading than the script, by Cretton and Andrew Lanham, allows Bryan here; he's so singleminded that we get little sense of who he is outside his job, and so unimpeachably moral that he comes off less like a person than an aspirational concept.
Jordan is nevertheless able to bring some depth to the character, tracing his arc from a softer, greener idealism to a tougher, more durable one with subtlety and soulfulness. He is well-matched by Foxx in a slightly showier role as McMillian, who understands exactly how risky and hard-won hope is in circumstances like his. Each gets a monologue that seems tailor-made to win over awards voters, and even garnered applause at the opening-night show I attended.
There's no doubt that Just Mercy's heart is in the right place, and it's made skillfully enough to push all the right buttons: joy, sorrow, a lingering sense of righteous fury. The final scenes make clear how much work there is still for Stevenson and other like-minded activists to do, and if it helps push forward the conversation on how we treat the marginalized and the condemned in America, it'll have done more good than most movies.
As a work of cinema, though, Just Mercy is a curiously restrained piece. It's missing the visionary spark that drove the real Stevenson to accomplish such great things in the first place.
