A Time to Kill (1996)

Joel Schumacher's adaptation of the John Grisham novel opens in 1984 Mississippi with a lynching, a rape, and a rifle, which is to say it does not ease into its subject matter. A ten-year-old girl is brutalized by two white supremacists, her father shoots them dead in the county courthouse, and the film spends the next two and a half hours sorting through the consequences. The Klan resurfaces, crosses burn on lawns, and a judge declines to move the trial, leaving an all-white jury to decide a Black man's fate. This is a film built on racial grievance and it knows it, devoting its long runtime to the mechanics of a Southern town tearing itself apart along a color line everyone can see.

Matthew McConaughey anchors the proceedings as the white attorney who must save a Black client, a structural choice the film never interrogates. Around him sits a substantial Black supporting cast, Samuel L. Jackson chief among them, quietly furious in a role that reportedly lost its best scenes in the edit. Sandra Bullock's law student is competent and useful until the screenplay decides she is more valuable as a hostage. She becomes a plot device with good posture. The film's investment in racial justice is genuine, and it is also arranged so that the white man does the arguing.

The moral architecture rests on a closing argument in which Jake Brigance asks twelve jurors to imagine the victim if she were white, a plea delivered with tears, strings, and no small amount of self-regard. It is a lecture, unmistakably, aimed at the courtroom and the audience in the same breath. French critics, who appended a question mark to the title, found the enterprise nauseating and borderline fascist, which is a great deal of heat for a studio thriller. The residue is a competent, overlong piece of moral machinery that argues for racial empathy while keeping a white man at the center of the argument. The progressive gestures are real. They are also load-bearing decoration.