It’s said that the worst thing you can give someone on death row is hope. It’s a theory that drives urgent legal drama Just Mercy, the real-life story of crusading civil rights defence attorney Bryan Stevenson (Jordan) that confronts the systemic racism at the heart of the American penal system.
1980s Alabama and ‘Johnny D’ McMillan (Foxx) is facing death by electric chair after being wrongly convicted of the murder of a white woman. The system that sent him to prison isn’t just corrupt on an individual level, but riddled with a widespread corruption that actively works to end the lives of innocent black men.
Into this brutal landscape strides Harvard graduate Bryan Stevenson, a full-hearted, righteous law graduate, who quickly has chunks knocked out of his optimism by both the discrimination he sees first-hand and McMillan’s rejection of his help. What the lawyer initially can’t comprehend is that hope can destroy too. For it’s hope that is so often inevitably dashed. That each man who sits on death row has witnessed it evaporate under the boots of the men who’ve taken the short walk to the execution chamber.
The chemistry between Jordan and Foxx is by turns brittle, intimate and warm — the two having known each other off screen since the former was just a boy. Individually, they each put in arresting performances. Michael B. Jordan carries Stevenson with a constantly shifting mix of pride, hope, anger, fear — digging into a fairly by-the-numbers arc to unearth nuance that other actors would likely have struggled to.
Where the film suffers is in the storytelling: the broad brushstrokes from director Destin Daniel Cretton’s hand offering no real room for great subtlety.
Jamie Foxx, however, is something else: it’s easily one of the performances of his career — arguably only Ray has seen him better. His Johnny D has a quiet, furious power that you can feel in every jaw clench, every muscle moved. The actor’s spoken of his father’s experiences — he was imprisoned for seven years for a minor crime — and it’s hard not to see a personal hurt coursing through him.
The brutality and horror of death row is iterated powerfully here; from the minor humiliations that keep the men bowed to the smell of the burnt flesh of other prisoners. That said, where the film suffers is in the storytelling: the broad brushstrokes from director Destin Daniel Cretton’s hand offering no real room for great subtlety. The complexity on display within the actors’ character work is not carried through to the wider direction.
And the biggest surprise — given her pedigree — is the light work given to Brie Larson as Stevenson’s colleague Eva Ansley. While this is clearly not her story, and nor should it be, her screen time is sparse and unmemorable. With little back story, context or motivation, her character barely registers.
