Review of Till, directed by Chinonye Chukwu

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This review is coming from a place of revisiting the movie Till. Back when it was first coming out in 2022, I was working as a film critic and interviewer over at MovieWeb, a position I have since left. But back then, I was working the New York Film Festival, and one of the movies I was covering at the time was Till.

I saw the movie twice; first I got a screener before the festival on the Upper East Side of New York, then I went to the actual press screening before the world premiere of the movie the same night. It was at 9 AM in the morning, and most of the cast was there. I ended up interviewing Chinonye Chukwu and Whoopi Goldberg for the film, and regret that I didn’t select Danielle as well.

The press screening was a little depressing to me, as a little under half of the Walter Reade Theatre was full. That same festival the press conference for a Noah Baumbach film filled two theaters; I thought it was telling, as this was an all-Black cast versus a mainly white one and director.

I wanted to revisit Till two years later (even though this blog post is going to come out in the spring of 2025 due to the sheer amount of backlog I have on this site) and think about it. Hence why this blog post is coming out at all.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to bore you with the context and semantics of how we ended up here together.

The story of Emmett Till, and the fight his mother led for some form of justice.

This is a movie that partially has its roots in the Great Migration; it opens in 1955, when Emmett Till, then 15, lives with his mother in Chicago. She’s preparing to send him back down south for a bit to visit their relatives in Mississippi, and his mother, Mamey, warns him that people down there are different than in the north. Emmett was born and raised in the North, so he doesn’t know how dangerous it is down south.

Emmett makes it to Mississippi, where his mother’s uncle and cousin pick him up. He joins them picking cotton on the fields, but when he goes to a store with his cousins to buy candy, he tells the white woman at the counter, Carolyn Bryant, she looks like a movie star. Disgusted, she follows him out of the store, and he whistles at her.

Carolyn starts grabbing her gun to shoot him, but his family pulls him into the car and away from there. This isn’t enough, as her husband Roy comes with his half-brother to the house, forces their way inside in night, and grab Emmett from his bed. They refuse any money, and Carolyn, in a vehicle, positively identifies Emmett.

They beat him, shoot Emmett to death, and then dump the body in the river. Mamie finds out in the morning what happened, and her cousin arranges a meeting with the NAACP. Mamie is questioned by them about her romantic and personal history as the police find her son’s body in the river. She collapses when the news of his death is relayed to her.

Mamie ends up requesting the body be returned to Chicago, and when it is brought off of the train, she starts crying. She decides she wants an open casket funeral for the world to see what was done to her boy, and the news makes it all over the country’s newspapers.

Two are charged for Till’s death, and Mamie heads down south in order to go to the trial. There, T.R.M Howard asks Mamie if she is interested in activism in the future. The trial heads off to an interesting start when the defense team learns of another witness, and asks to adjourn.

Eyewitness Willie Reed is brought into by the prosecutor. Other testimonies on the stand include Wright, who points out who held the family at gunpoint, and Mamie herself. She’s cross-examined due to her press coverage, while Carolyn claims that Emmett grabbed her by the waste and said he had an interracial romance.

Mamie leaves the courthouse thinking that she knows what will happen. They are acquitted, and the film shows her at a rally talking about how the justice system failed her son, and that the United States is not a place of equality. The movie ends with her going home to Emmett’s room and remembering him flitting around it.

Finally, the post-credits show that Mamie continued to fight for equal rights and help pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Overall Thoughts

I think a lot of people were hesitant about this film for a variety of reasons, and I can see why. For a start: I am not Black or African-American. I am Middle-Eastern American. I have and will continue to spend my life educating myself and containing to read Black history, which has been an effort I documented on this blog.

But what a lot of people miss about this movie is that it’s not solely about Emmett. The tragedy of his life and death is the driving force oft he film for sure, but this is more focused on his mother’s fight for justice after her little boy was murdered. She was a remarkable woman, and Danielle Deadwyler was seriously robbed of an Oscar nomination for this movie. She was incredible!

If you can handle it, I recommend watching the film at least once. When I’d talk about it to people, I started becoming shocked at how few people around me knew who Till even was, which shows how important these movies are. I remember it was only recently Carolyn Bryant died, which shows this racism was alive and well.

Go watch it if you haven’t already. It’s important.

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