In recent years, one of the most well-known passages of Scripture has come from Micah the minor prophet.
I’ve seen the verse emblazoned on coffee mugs and painted on walls; I memorised it in youth group. All these years later, I can still type it from memory:
He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
I suspect Bryan Stevenson has also memorised this verse. Perhaps he’s got a mug emblazoned with its message. After all, Stevenson is a Christian, and he’s given his life to the pursuit of justice. For more than three decades, he’s sought to ‘do justice’ by fighting for the rights of death-row inmates.
Just Mercy, adapted from Stevenson’s memoir of the same name, tells his story. It’s an unadorned yet heart-wrenching look at injustice on death row. By unadorned, I simply mean that director Destin Daniel Cretton told the story straight and without flourish. One wonders how a more imaginative director – say, Barry Jenkins or Spike Lee – would have approached the story.
But I don’t want to overstate this. Despite its spartan straightforwardness, Just Mercy still sings.
Let’s start with the performances. If you watch clips of Stevenson in real life, you’ll realize Michael B. Jordan plays him dutifully. Brie Larson is just fine as Eva Ansley, Stevenson’s partner-in-crime. But just about everything elevates once we leave the courtroom for death row. Jamie Foxx plays the soon-to-be-executed Walter McMillan; he surges with both fury and friendliness, an emotive yin to Jordan’s even-keel yang.
Every death-row casting choice is pitch-perfect. Tim Blake Nelson, O’Shea Jackson, and Rob Morgan. There’s not a whiff among them. They all dazzle amidst the dimness. You might wonder if their constant desperation yields diminishing returns. That’s a reasonable question – and it might be the case if every actor had merely played the same character under a different name. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen. Far from flattening these characters into tropes, the dehumanising experience of death hones them into human beings. It’s truly astonishing to watch.
One scene in particular coalesces these triumphs. I don’t want to spoil it for you, so I’ll say nothing more than this: it made me long for heaven. Thinking of it now brings chills.
The film’s not perfect. Though every speech reverberates with moral clarity, there are too many of them. By the end I felt both bludgeoned and beleaguered. Again, I wonder if another director wouldn’t have succumbed to the temptation to repeat himself over and over again. I wish the film let subtext and silence do more work.
But despite these flaws – and look at me, repeating myself, it’s so easy to do – Just Mercy deserves your time. Christians should flock to see it. The Lord requires justice; may this film encourage that desire in all of us.
Questions:
1. The film ends with a few surprising, terrifying statistics. How should we understand chapters like Romans 13 in light of these facts?
2. It’s possible to argue that Just Mercy underplays Stevenson’s faith. Why does it matter that he does these things as a Christian?
JUST MERCY
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Cert: 12A 137 mins
Alex Duke is Youth Ministry Director at North Shore Baptist Church, Queens, New York.
