Till is a 2022 biopic drama film directed by Chinonye Chukwu and written by Michael Reilly, Keith Beauchamp, and Chukwu. It stars Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, Frankie Faison, Haley Bennett, Kevin Carroll, and Whoopi Goldberg. Beauchamp, Reilly, and Goldberg also produced the film.
The film tells the real-life story of Mamie Till-Mobley (Deadwyler), an American educator and activist from Chicago, Illinois, who pursued justice for her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till (Hall), who in 1955, was lynched in Drew, Mississippi, while he was on vacation visiting his cousins after being accused of flirting with a white woman at a local grocery store, with his brutal murder becoming one of the catalysts of the Civil Rights Movement.
The film was released in the United States by United Artists Releasing through Orion Pictures on October 28, 2022, and was released in the United Kingdom on January 13, 2023, by Universal Pictures.
Compare Women of the Movement, a mini-series about the same story that was released earlier in 2022.
Previews: Trailer
, Trailer 2, International Trailer.
Till provides examples of the following tropes:
- The '50s: Where the tragic story takes place.
- '50s Hair: The movie shows a range of tightly pincurled, short hairstyles for women, especially Mamie's prim and short curls.
- Based on a True Story: The film is based on the real-life lynching of Emmett Till and his mother's actions to pursue justice for him.
- Beauty Inversion: The pretty Haley Bennett is made to look frumpy as Carolyn Bryant, with an unflattering 50s hairdo to boot.
- Birth-Death Juxtaposition: After Emmett died, Mamie is surrounded by and amongst the people attending his funeral, including young children such as the Evers's two-year old son.
- Blaming the Victim: During the events of the trial, Mamie has to go out of her way to avoid being seen as a "jezebel" so the media can't paint Emmett as "deserving" of his death. Later on during the final speech, Mamie comments on how the justice system of Mississippi was content to blame Emmett for his own lynching.
- Body Horror: Emmett's corpse post-mortem. His body is horrifically bruised and swollen, his right eye is gouged out, and his face is barely recognizable as human. Mamie insists on holding an open-casket funeral to make sure everyone knows just what her son's killers did to him.
- Bystander Syndrome: Mamie notes at the end that, before her own son's death, she was content to dismiss the abuse of blacks in the Jim Crow South as none of her business since she resided in the Northern United States. However, after her son is killed, she declares that any death of a black person is all of their business.
- Emmett's family helplessly watch as their cousin/nephew is abducted from the house, since they would most likely be killed if they try to intervene, only reduced to pleading to spare him to no avail.
- Category Traitor: As seen when the lynch mob kidnaps Emmett, there are black men who are amongst them and took part in his murder. In the trial, a black man tells the court that white men weren’t just the only ones involved with Emmett's lynching, black men participated in it.
- Childish Tooth Gap: The young Emmett has a gap between his front teeth.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Though much of it isn't shown onscreen, as in the Real Life tragedy, Emmett's lynching consists of him being beaten to the extent of being unrecognizable, having his eye removed, tied and dragged by car, shot in the head, and drowned in the river by a racist lynch mob. The sadistic brutality of his death left his body horrifically disfigured, prompting Mamie to have his casket open so the whole world can see the body.
- Disproportionate Retribution: For commenting that Carolyn looks like a movie star and wolf-whistling at her, Emmett is violently abducted by a lynch mob led by Carolyn's husband Roy Bryant, all of whom proceeded to brutally torture him to death.
- Due to the Dead: The Coroner asks Mamie about "fixing" Emmett's body, since the lynching left his body in quite a horrific state. Mamie refuses however, to allow everyone to see what was done to him.
- Evil Is Petty: Emmett tries to ask to at least put his shoes on when he is forcefully dragged out, but Roy tells him that he won't need them, wanting to deny him being treated like a human being in his last moments.
- Gory Discretion Shot:
- In an effort to avoid "trauma porn," Emmett's lynching is never shown; we see what happens immediately before, and there's a landscape shot with his blood-curling screams in the distance, but not the lynching itself.
- Defied in the case of Emmett's corpse after his death, as in real life. Despite knowing that her son's corpse will horrify those who see it, Mamie wants the world to see what happened to him, and as such holds an open-casket funeral with his grisly corpse on full display, which the audience does end up seeing.
- Howl of Sorrow:
- Mamie breaks down at the train station when Emmett's body is delivered to Chicago, screaming for someone to "let him out of that box!" and asking God why this is happening.
- Emmett's aunt, when she sees his disfigured body in his coffin, collapses into a fit of screams and sobs.
- Kangaroo Court: The Mississippi court are obviously in favor of acquitting Roy and J.W. of the murder charges despite the horrific nature of it, all because the victim was black. Both men are eventually acquitted after Carolyn is allowed on the stand to lie and slander Emmett.
- Karma Houdini:
- Roy and J.W. are both acquitted of the murder. Despite confessing to it in an interview a year later, they do not face retaliation for the brutal murder of Emmett and live the rest of their lives as free men and.
- Carolyn Bryant is never charged for her role in the murder despite sicking her husband and his friends onto Emmett, identifying him to them directly, and perjuring herself to slander Emmett during the murder trial.
- Mama Bear:
- Emmett's aunt, to no avail, begs Roy and his minions to spare Emmett, pleading that she will punish her nephew severely for whatever he is being accused of.
- Mamie doesn't take her son's death easily but knows that no one will believe how sadistic his death was unless she opened his casket to reveal the world his horrific corpse and goes down to the dreaded town in Mississippi to speak out for her son.
- Mama's Boy: Emmett is shown to be very close to Mamie, partially due to his father having died when he was very young.
- Mononymous Biopic Title: "Till", the surname of Emmett and Mamie.
- Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Carolyn Bryant, is a downplayed example. She appears none too bright and passive but she overreacts to Emmett's compliments about her looking like a movie star, culminating in frantically shouting for nearby white men to get him as she chases him out the store, before getting husband and his friends to kill the teenage Emmett, outright lying in court that he molested her.
- Oh, Crap!: Emmett's relatives' reaction when they realize that the former made a comment at Carolyn, chastising him for it as they fear that he would be killed for it. They are sadly proven correct.
- The Oner: Mamie's testimony at the trial is done as one, long continuous take, all focused on her face.
- Outliving One's Offspring: As in the real life tragedy, Mamie has to bury her son after a racist lynch mob brutally kills him.
- Papa Wolf: Emmett's uncle, like his aunt, tried to plead with the lynch mob to spare his nephew since he is just a child and doesn't know any better of how seriously bad the racism is in Mississippi, only to be quickly overwhelmed and helplessly watch his nephew be abducted.
- Parents Know Their Children: As Mamie says on the stand, she knew it was Emmett despite his body being so disfigured because she can recognize his body structure and dental work.
- Parent with New Paramour: Emmett's father has been dead for a decade, and Mamie is now dating Gene. No one in her life has a problem with it; he gets on well with her family, and Emmett in particular is shown to really like him. However, since she and Gene aren't married, the NAACP (correctly) guesses that Mamie will be slut-shamed by the media as they try to dig up any information that could possibly "justify" Emmett's murder. It's because of this that Gene doesn't accompany her to Mississippi for the trial despite really wanting to; he's grieving Emmett, too, and wants justice for his death just as much as Mamie, but she has to consider the optics.
- "Ray of Hope" Ending: Emmett is dead, and his killers get no punishment. It will be over fifty years until there are federal laws against lynching. But Mamie eventually marries Nice Guy Gene, and spends the rest of her life as a civil rights activist, her actions being highly important to the movement. The story ends in a bleak place, and things are still far from perfect, but there is still hope for a better future, where things like this won't happen anymore.
- The Savage South: Emmett is said to not understand "how different things are" in Mississippi compared to his native Chicago, Illinois. While he is down there, he gets accused of flirting with a white woman and is viciously lynched.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Mamie decides to pull out of Mississippi entirely after Carolyn is allowed to testify and slander her son, realizing that her son's murderers are going to be acquitted and there's nothing she can do about it.
- Slut-Shaming: Of all the things that comes up after Emmett's death, is Mamie being accused of being a "Jezebel" due to her estranged marriage to Emmett's father then divorce prior to his death. Averted for Carolyn, who gets to invoke racism for her innocence.
- Tearful Smile: The final scene has Mamie managing a smile through her tears as she stands in Emmett's bedroom and remembers him for what he was during his lifetime: a normal, happy kid.
- Train-Station Goodbye: Emmett and his mother embrace each other near a train and Emmett waves goodbye after boarding it.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The final slides show the fates of some of the main characters.
- Mamie and Gene marry and become leaders in the civil rights movement. Gene dies in 2000, while Mamie dies in 2003.
- Medgar Evers becomes a leader in the civil rights movement before being assassinated in 1963 in front of his family.
- After being acquitted, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam both confess to the murder and live the rest of their lives as free men.
- Carolyn Bryant is never charged for her role in Emmett's death.
- Would Hurt a Child: This film is about one of the most egregious, heinous murders of a child ever committed. The vehemently racist Roy Bryant, J.W. Milam, and their accomplices have no qualms in violently abducting Emmett from his aunt's home in the middle of the night and brutally torturing and killing him in a barn shack before dumping his body in a nearby river, the lynching of which left his body horrifically mutilated and completely unrecognizable.
- Young Future Famous People: The young man who drives Mamie in Mound Bayou, Mississippi is Medgar Evers, an activist who was later assassinated in 1963 and Myrlie Evers-Williams, his wife (also a journalist and activist) and a speaker at Barack Obama's 2013 Inauguration.
