JUST MERCY
Directed by: Destin Daniel Cretton
Running time: 136 minutes
Release date: December 23, 2019 (Limited) & January 10, 2020 (Wide)
Genre: Drama, Biopic, and Adaptation
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13

In an American true story of Walter McMillian, a black man who with the help of young black defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, appeals his murder conviction of a white 18 year old Ronda Morrison in 1986 Alabama.  Adapted from the novel by Bryan Stevenson by the same title, it is a film focusing on the two African-American men who battle the legally bias court system that has incarcerated countless people.

The film stars Michael B. Jordan as attorney Bryan Stevenson, Jamie Foxx as Walter McMillian, and Brie Larson as Eva Ansley, along with Rob Morgan, Tim Blake Nelson, and Rafe Spall.

Attorney Bryan Stevenson takes the case of Walter McMillian, a man wrongfully imprisoned for a murder of a white woman.  This is a serious character study, plot-driven presentation portraying realistic characters, settings, life situations, and stories involving intense character development and interaction.  It is an epic period-piece that takes on specific historical intent that plagues the American legal system.

The plot contextually begins with Walter McMillian, a black man who lives and works in a black settlement near Monroeville, a remote "dirt-poor" region of pine trees and bean farms.  He is married and has children, without any criminal record other than a misdemeanor charge stemming from a barroom fight.  However, he had a well known extra-marital affair with a white woman. 

18 year old Ronda Morrison, a white dry-cleaning clerk, was murdered on November 1986.  At the time of her murder, Walter McMilian was at a church fish fry with dozen of witnesses, one whom was a police officer.  Yet, Walter, who had no prior felony convictions, was arrested by newly elected Sheriff Tom Tate on June 1987, who was under pressure to find a suspect.  Walter was apprehended and was immediately sent to Alabama's Death Row facility, which is usually reserved for convicted murderers awaiting execution.  He remained there, pre-trial, for 15 months.  In a rigged trial on December 1987 Walter was convicted with another duped person.

The other layer of this story is about Bryan Stevenson, an African-American lawyer, social justice activist, and founder/executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and a clinical professor at NYU School of Law.  Based in Montgomery, Alabama, Stevenson has challenged bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system.  His beginnings is of a religious foundation, where as a youth in Delaware and Pennsylvania played piano and sang in church.  As a child in the 1960s and 1970s Stevenson dealt with segregation and its legacy.  He spent his first classroom years at a "colored" elementary school.  By the time he entered his second year the desegregation laws went into effect, but the old rules from segregation still applied.  Years later, after high academics through school(s),  he earned his full scholarship to attend and graduated at Harvard Law School, and earned a Master's in Public Policy at the JFK School of Government in 1985.  He then opened his defense organization in Montgomery, Alabama (funded by Congress), a resource center, Equal Justice Initiative.  He guaranteed to provide legal assistance to people on death row in Alabama, the highest per capita rate of death penalty sentencing.

The film itself brilliantly portrays these two men's personal journey with the strain of racial injustice in American life.  Against tremendous odds, this film examines and takes its audience into a world of dismay and resolvement of a wrongly convicted man.  It is a must see movie.

FILM RATING (A)