‘Till’ review: Danielle Deadwyler channels a mother’s grief in brilliant performance

Movie review

One approaches “Till” with dread. One knows where the picture is going.

It’s going down to rural Mississippi in August 1955 where Black 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall), visiting from Chicago, is dragged from his great-uncle’s house in the middle of the night at gunpoint by two white men, taken away and viciously murdered. 

Director-writer Chinonye Chukwu mercifully distances the audience from the savagery of the act, positioning her camera far from a shed from which briefly heard is a faint cry and the sound of a beating. 

What isn’t faint is the sound of the reaction of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler). Upon receiving her son’s body back home in Chicago, she utters a piercing shriek of soul-deep grief and towering rage. She has lost her only child, and she is shattered. Out of everything else in “Till,” it’s that cry that stays with you when the picture is over. It goes home with you. It invades your sleep.

It’s but one aspect of Deadwyler’s performance which is such that “powerful” is an insufficient term to describe it.

Slim and self-possessed, she is equally compelling in the picture’s quieter passages. Standing alone, seen in profile, questioning, contemplative, stunned to silence by her grief, she commands the screen with her unspoken forcefulness.

“Till” is above all a mother’s story. It’s Mamie’s decision to have her son’s casket open at his funeral that sets his death apart from ever so many lynched Black men in the South in those days, the era memorialized by the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit.” The image of Emmett’s grotesquely disfigured face, captured on camera at Mamie’s request by the Black magazine Jet, stirs worldwide revulsion at the crime and the regional racism that fostered it. “I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy,” she says.

That revulsion and Mamie’s indefatigable personality combined to energize the struggle for Black rights in the 20th century that evolved into the civil rights movement.  

At the heart of the story is that mother’s love. At the opening, the bond between Mamie, a single mom, and Emmett is characterized by sweetness. Hall portrays him as a smiling, joyous kid, and his mom is both his soul mate and protector. 

She is ever mindful of the hazards of Black life in America, even up north in Chicago. When Emmett is invited to visit cousins in Mississippi, she is quietly uneasy. She has raised her boy to be ever aware of not giving offense to white people. To avoid that, she counsels him to “be small.” If in Mississippi he finds himself in a confrontation with white folks, she tells him to get down on his knees and apologize.

Despite her misgivings, she allows him to go on his visit because he’s growing to manhood and she can’t protect him forever. So he waves goodbye to her from the train going South. And she never sees him alive again.

A fleeting encounter with a white woman clerk at a small town store in which he gives a wolf whistle at her dooms him. Her husband and half-brother vow vengeance, abduct him, torture him and kill him. 

Under Chukwu’s steady, sensitive direction, Deadwyler’s performance is such that it overshadows everyone else in the movie. Notable among the supporting characters is Tosin Cole as NAACP member Medgar Evers, who supports and admires Mamie’s courage, and Jayme Lawson as his wife Myrlie Evers, whose love for her own young children makes her empathetic with Mamie.

Her courage sends Mamie to Mississippi to attend the trial of Emmett’s killers, a trial where the not guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion. 

With Medgar Evers’ assassination by a white supremacist in 1963 and George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020, it’s clear this country still has a long way to go in the struggle for racial justice personified by Mamie.