Catching Up: "Just Mercy"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

The story of Just Mercy is so good, so compelling, and the movie is made and performed with such crackling intensity, that it may come as a surprise about two-thirds of the way through to realize it's actually based on a true story.

Just Mercy moves with the narrative thrust of a legal thriller – an idealistic young lawyer, fresh out of Harvard (Michael B. Jordan) moves to the Deep South to become an advocate for death row convicts.  It's the late 1980s, but in Monroeville, Ala., time has stopped, and other than the cars, the phones and some embarrassing hair choices, nothing has changed at all since long before the town's most famous resident, Harper Lee, wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. Townsfolk proudly tell the new black man in town, who they assume is visiting, not to miss the Mockingbird museum, proudly asserting that Atticus Finch was real.

As the lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, meets the men he wants to help, their stories stun him. Two in particular – a Vietnam veteran (Rob Morgan) so emotionally wounded by battle that he still cannot understand why he did what he did, and the hardened and embittered Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), who has come to believe it's irrelevant that he didn't actually commit the murder that sent him to prison. Truth, he knows, is merely an inconvenience. But Stevenson is determined, and he's helped by a young woman (Brie Larson) whose skin color is a distinct advantage in the "community" that only considers white people.

Just Mercy is indeed concerned with travesties of justice, which makes it achingly relevant. Director Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12) has set to to make a superior thriller, and it's because Just Mercy works so fantastically well at that level that it more than earns its disbelieving rage and clear-eyed anger. Just Mercy will get you worked up, but not at the expense of a captivating story told with impressive style and skill.



Viewed June 9, 2020 -- VOD

"The Vast of Night"

 ☆☆☆ 

To set us in the right frame of mind, The Vast of Night (exclusively on Amazon Prime) opens with a sly and inventive riff on Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," pushing in to a mid-century television set that presents the story as a tale of the weird and unexplainable.

Indeed, much of The Vast of Night is deliciously weird and unexplainable, also visually stylish and suffused with the lonely, echoing feel of a distant AM radio station playing love songs at night.

That makes sense because the film, by first-time director Andrew Patterson (from a script by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger) is set in a remote, barren New Mexico town in the late 1950s, when thoughts of Sputnik and atomic war and monsters from beyond filled everyone's heads. Everett (Jake Horowitz) is the DJ at the local AM radio station and Fay (Sierra McCormick) is the overnight telephone operator. In a wonderfully acted, technically dazzling scene near the beginning of this brief, moody movie, Fay comes across a strange sound, and soon discovers that something even stranger seems to be happening outside of her little cubby hole of an office.

She and Everett begin to investigate, and stumble onto a complicated backstory related by two people in scenes that are not nearly as captivating as they should be. Because The Vast of Night was made on a minuscule budget, the film necessarily needs to tell more than than it can show. That may be all well and good for an indie drama, but if you're going to tell a sci-fi story like this as a movie, you need to be prepared to show more than The Vast of Night possibly can. In two uncomfortably long stretches, the screen turns black – and while that's unnerving and disorienting, it's also less effective than director Patterson hopes.

Another scene with a woman who may hold a key to understanding the mystery goes on far too long – it takes up about 20 percent of the movie's short running time, and the energy flags. The finale gives us more than might be reasonably expected, but after such a strong, mesmerizing start and such a bad fumble a third of the way in, The Vast of Night ends less with a bang than with a whimper.



Viewed May 31, 2020 – Amazon Prime