Review: "Till" Mishandles A National Tragedy

The story of Emmett Till gets an unworthy retelling in this melodramatic historical drama.

November 19, 2022

In the summer of 1955, a young Black boy, born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, ventured to the Mississippi Delta to see his mother’s birth home. Although his grandmother had planned a vacation to visit relatives in Nebraska, he had begged her to let him go. She conceded, and so he went.

His name was Emmett Till.

Just one year removed from the incendiary Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, racial segregation and its underlying bigoted ideals were at fever pitch, fueling a cultural divide so severe that a person of color simply stepping out their front door invited death.

Mississippi was no place for a Black kid.

On August 21, Till went into Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a local store owned by white couple Roy and Carolyn Bryant, to buy candy. What happened in the store is disputed to this day. What followed is not.

Roy and his half-brother drove to where Till was staying, forced him from the house at gunpoint, and threw him into the back of the car before pistol-whipping him until he lost consciousness. Afterward, they brought him to a barn, where they beat Emmett as he wept for mercy, relenting only to move him to a nearby river to shoot him and dispose of his body.

Emmett's naked, mutilated corpse got found three days later. One of his eyes was out of its socket, and his face was so distorted he was unrecognizable. He was identifiable only by the ring on his finger, engraved with the initials “L.T.” and a date: May 25, 1943.

Till’s death sparked outrage in black communities across the country, his death a punishment for violating an archaic and lethally racist social system. Despite nationwide outrage, and the shock of Emmett's open-casket funeral, his killers (who boasted of their crime to Look magazine just a year after the trial) got acquitted by an all-white jury. The decision catalyzed the Civil Rights Movement: the Montgomery Bus Boycotts started just four months after Emmett's murder.

No murder is ordinary, but Emmett Till’s holds a special significance in the cultural fabric of America. It rocked those ignorant of how deeply-entrenched racism was in American culture but was a celebratory moment for a South still dominated by Jim Crow Laws.

Now, nearly seven decades later, America has faced Rodney King, Latasha Harlins, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, among many others. The Internet has made racially-motivated killings inescapable, almost like a reality of daily life in the United States. We can feel many things about what we see whenever another Black person gets killed, whether by a Korean store owner, an overzealous neighborhood watchman, or a white police officer, but the one thing we cannot justly claim to feel is shock.

It is always the difficulty of historical dramas, and the closer in time we are to the narrative, the trickier the balancing act. A 2022 audience can't remove themselves from their perspective and view the world through a 1955 lens. Racism exists now as it does then, but so do refrigeration and mashed potatoes. We’ve improved the technology/recipes for those two; that which remains will change. Adapt to survive. Racism has adapted to live on in a nation less receptive than 70 years ago. We cannot see it now for what it was then. Till often feels like it knows this too well, hence its choice to embrace melodrama and manipulation, even in the tiniest details.

The film dances around Emmett's father, refusing to address him too directly to support the light implication that he was an honored serviceman who died nobly in WWII.

In truth, Emmett's father, Louis was a philanderer who became physically abusive when Mamie confronted him about his infidelity. The threat he posed was so severe that a judge granted a restraining order, one Louis violated so routinely that the court gave him a choice: prison or the Army.

Louis’ time in the Armed Forces ended when he got wrongfully convicted of rape and murder while overseas, then executed by hanging. The women he supposedly attacked could not identify their attackers; the trial was (much like the one for the men who tortured and killed his son) a farce.

However, films function like people: if the truth gets hidden, the only conclusion to draw is that there is something they feel is worth hiding. It is not for a movie to decide what does and does not matter. Anything that gets kept from an audience gets concealed by design; movies, while not always great, do not make mistakes. Till refuses to confront who Emmett’s father was because it’s too complex a truth with which to trust an audience, and that choice to assume what we can and cannot reconcile undermines the film.

After all, the skeletons in our closets are wholly reasonable to us, but that doesn’t mean anyone else will understand. Till, by making indirect implications about Louis’ character, sanitizes reality because it does not trust us to embrace its ideas if there’s any “excuse” to demonize a black man. Sadly, it’s not relevant; the truth got sanitized regardless of intent, and the only path one can take in such an instance is to believe that the film feels that concealment is superior to transparency.

It’s an approach that saps the film of its emotional weight. It is not just a matter of being honest regarding everything it portrays; it’s a matter of how manipulative the film becomes concerning a story that requires no manipulation. Louis Till can be a violent man without affecting the legitimacy of the case against his son's killers. Mississippians did not feel that way in 1955, but it's a reach to believe the filmmakers wanted to draw a parallel.

As such, the only conclusion is that Till does not trust us to believe that, so it becomes a Lifetime movie. Even with its music, a bizarre cross between Interstellar, The Crown, and Game of Thrones, we never find reprieve from the melodrama. It is a stage play put to film in every respect, particularly in how it makes its points.

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Till never understands the “how” of emotion. Emmett’s murder was a tragedy for the potential wasted, pain endured, and racism employed to prevent his killers from getting brought to justice. We follow the journey of a mother in pain, forced to grapple with the racial realities of 1950s America while grieving for a son whose justice she must seek. We don’t need a moment of defiance against her opportunistic cousin, where the emotions have boiled over and she cannot stand another second of her new reality, to get shot from a 45-degree angle straight up her nose.

It is also true for all the syrupy cinematography and overexposed backgrounds, all the lip quivering, welling eyes, and wailing over Emmett’s coffin. Till wants to immerse us in the tragedy and force us to graduate from reactive sympathy to genuine empathy, but it cannot stop itself from manipulating us through the process. Mamie can weep all she wants; it will make Emmett’s passing no more or less tragic. The Chicago haven from which Emmett departed can be as oversaturated as possible; it will feel no less devastating that the racist's Shangri-La of Mississippi was a world away for a young black boy.

Movies should not shy away from emotion, but every note should come as a natural narrative function. The deeper we dive into a story, the more fully we understand it; that understanding will bring about everything a movie seeks to inspire. Till doesn’t need the theatrics of Mamie fainting while her loved ones cartoonishly tend to her on the living room floor. It doesn’t need to pretend Louis Till was someone he was not or shy away from Emmett’s mischievous nature or the inherent spirit it takes to pull a butcher knife on an abusive stepfather at 11 years old. Till is so terrified of any risk that the story feels insincere. Mamie’s propriety, Emmett’s childishness, and the endless smirking of the racists condemning justice to the gallows feel like a means to avoid telling a true story, one that holds firm to its realities and never shies away from the fact that nothing can justify its content.

Of course, sensible viewers would never question that fact. Alas, in modern America, how many viewers can we count on to be sensible? It’s what makes movies a complicated medium to master, now more than ever. Filmmakers must ask themselves who their audience truly is and thus how to make their movie. Intent must shine through, and on those intentions, it will either legitimize itself or come to ruin.

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‍Till feels like a movie made for no reason and thus has no audience but the one behind the lens. A film made for the uninitiated: those down-home Southerners descended from the bigots that prioritized senseless hate over a matter of right and wrong, the kind that stormed the United States Capitol nearly two years ago, would look vastly different. The same is true of a film made for Mamie and Emmett Till or the countless black families that have watched their loved ones brutalized or murdered in the name of bigotry or one made for the white people who want to pat themselves on the back for not being prejudiced.

At least those movies would have something to offer: anger, frustration, exasperation, resolve, even conceit would suffice. Till offers nothing that would inspire anything we do not already feel. Anyone familiar with the story of Emmett Till will not find new perspective or heightened appreciation from seeing history put to film, and the unfamiliar will be better off reading the Wikipedia article and calling it a night.

Till will make, and thus leave, no impression. As such, we have only the questions it raises about movies themselves. Have they lost their way? Can they both ask and answer tough questions? Will they return to a time when they trusted their audience enough to take the lessons on the chin and embrace the truth for being what it is? The answers are likely many years and many films away, but for now, we have Till to remind us that simply because a movie tells a worthy story does not mean it’s worth watching.