Emmett Till was a 14 year old boy from Chicago, Illinois. While visiting his family in Mississippi, he was lynched by a group of men, because he looked at a white girl in a wrongful way. After his death, his mother tried her best to have the murderers brought to justice and failed. She then spent her last years trying to make lynching a federal crime. 67 years later, in March 2022, lynching became a federal crime. The movie is the story of this little boy, having lived his whole life pretty free to be whoever who wanted, and visiting the South of the USA where segregation was still very much the norm. His mother being quite anxious, and trying to make him understand how he must act in front of white people. You basically see Emmett being a confident kid, proud of who he is, and showing it to others. Which gets him in troubles when he tries to woo a white woman. Her family as well as some black men come to kidnap him in the middle of the night, mutilate him and shoot him in the face. And this is where the problems in the movie start. Rather than recounting the story with the trial, the director decided to get you through the story first, and have the witnesses as well as the mother go through the same scenes again. I get that the idea was to press on the matter, but the result is a very lengthy movie, that is more than 2hours long, and that could have easily been made shorter. The movie lacks rhythm and it makes it hard to stay interested in the characters, no matter how good they are played by the amazing actors in the movie.
Review of Till
