Palmer (2021)

Palmer arrives on Apple TV+ with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly which buttons it intends to press. Justin Timberlake plays Eddie Palmer, a former high school football star who returns to his Louisiana hometown after twelve years in prison for a robbery that ended with a man nearly beaten to death. He moves in with his grandmother, takes a job mopping floors at the local school, and reluctantly inherits the care of Sam, the neighbor boy whose mother prefers her abusive boyfriend to her son. The setup is sturdy. The execution is familiar to the point of comfort.

Sam is the film's moral engine. He wears makeup, strums a ukulele, and endures the casual cruelty of classmates and, more pointedly, of grown men who find his presentation intolerable. The screenplay treats his difference as something to be defended, and the defense is mounted with sincerity. There is no ambiguity in the film's position: the boy is fine, the world that shames him is not. That position is delivered through melodrama, warm lighting, and a climactic embrace, which softens the sermon into something closer to a hug. The result is earnest, well-acted, and entirely unsurprising.

Elsewhere the film is content to let its Black characters exist without a single line about race, which is either admirable restraint or simple avoidance, depending on the viewer's mood. Maggie, Sam's teacher, serves as both moral validator and romantic prize, her function in the narrative largely to confirm that Eddie has become a good man. The rich family Eddie once robbed appears only as backstory, carrying no weight of class or economics. Nobody in this small town worries about the climate. The house, the church, the root beer float: the film trades in the textures of American decency and asks little of its audience beyond a willingness to feel. It is a gentle film. Gentle is not the same as urgent, and Palmer seems untroubled by the difference.