Big, big problem with the writing...

I had no preconceived ideas about the film, in fact, those I had were pretty positive. I read it was a gripping courtroom drama with Samuel L. Jackson playing one of his most compelling characters (on that level, I would say his performance was worthy of an Oscar nomination), but for all the good things that "A Time to Kill" provides, there are several moments where I encountered very frustrating weaknesses in the writing, both in the form and in the content, and I'm not even sure which ones are the worse.

First of all, could the bad guys be any badder? I know these things exist and that people are capable of the worst, but talk about 'overkill', in the first seconds, you got all the racist redneck clichés wrapped up in these two villains, the Confederate flag, the pick-up truck, the booze, I'm not saying the film should have portrayed them in a more nuanced way, guys who rape and attempt to kill a little girl certainly don't behave in a three-dimensional way, but you don't need to go all 'buahahaha' on the screen to state your hatred and vileness. The rape and the murder attempt were shocking enough to provoke an immediate reaction on us, did it really need all that 'dressing'?

But even by assuming these guys were rotten to the bone, how about their friends or relatives? Didn't we have enough with the two rapists so we also had to deal with this KKK subplot. It was like every twenty minutes in the film, we needed a booster shoot to remind us who the good and the bad people were. I know subtlety isn't Schumacher's strongest suit but when you think about it, the story didn't need these elements. Having a father murdering the men who raped his daughter was the perfect set-up, and all the film needed was to build on this, not to add extra elements reminding how racism still prevails in the South, we already had the proof through the opening crime. So, instead of dealing with the pain of the little girl's mother, instead of having scenes in the courtroom reminding us that 'an eye for an eye' doesn't stand for justice, and make that the core of the debate, the film was just about racism.

It's one thing to deal with racism, but it's like the writer was blinded by his own 'personal' crusade that he didn't think the story could have been tackled from a more challenging and, say, neutral perspective, it could ask legitimate questions about 'vigilante' justice. I read many users saying "if I was the father, I would have blown their heads off starting with their pants (and apart from that, some are against Death penalty)", but that's not what the father did. He didn't kill them as soon as he got a chance, which could have been an 'immediate' reaction, he anticipated the verdict and told his lawyer about his decision, and he executed them, plain and simple. We only assume he was right to kill the two guys if we take it for granted that these men wouldn't have had the right sentence, and for me, this is a certitude, the script fails to deliver.

Indeed, we don't know, if a prosecutor had delivered a similar speech than the climactic one, mentioning all the graphic and disgusting details about the little girl's rape, are we to assume that the jury would have acquitted these two men or given them a suspended sentence? Well, if that's the case, that means that the very cause of the film is lost, that racial hatred and prejudice is inherent to the population. But I refuse to believe it, I refuse to believe that there wouldn't have been mothers in the jury room who'd have felt there was no attenuating circumstances whatsoever to that brutal act. But we have to believe the script, because it says to us that's how the Law works, but as far as I'm concerned, it's pretty much a MacGuffin, we're supposed to believe that's how it happens in order to understand the father's action. Fair enough, but that's not the stuff good trial films like In Cold Blood or Inherit the Wind are made off.

These are movies that raised thought-provoking questions. A Time to Kill provides the good question, but, as if it didn't trust our intelligence enough, it also gives the answer: it's all about racism, and not only that, it provides you the arguments about racism. So, instead of being a confrontation between two disturbing realities, a horrendous crime and a questionable act of vengeance, it becomes your routinely battle between good and bad guys. And we follow the journey of the young lawyer Brigance, facing burning crosses and houses while his entourage is harassed and threatened by phone calls. We have to get through these cliché scenes where someone tells him "it's not worth it", the moment where his wife reproaches him to spend too much time on this case (boy, did I cringe on this one), where his secretary tells him he's gone too far, and a moment where obviously, the cause is lost because the attorney unveiled the past of a key witness. Big deal, such a story deserved better than these shallow bits of writing, stuff that we've seen over and over again.

Basically, apart from Jackson and McConaughey, there's no single three-dimensional character in the film, Sandra Bullock is the wannabe assistant who miraculously provides all the needed elements (but you can tell, she's the screenplay's convenient provider of information) and when she's the victim of the most brutal assault, what does she say when Brigance comes to her? "I had to do this, so you could call me Ellen", this is cute, but too cinematic. Even the one character who could have added some nuance, the cop played by Chris Cooper, who lost his leg in the fusillade, had to shout "I would have done the same", okay, I could buy that but did he have to add "he's a hero, turn him loose", would you call a hero someone who cut your leg off? But this is only a critic on the form, to answer my question, I think it goes wrong when the writing undermines the film's message.

See, I thought "Shaft" had a sort of pro-vigilante message and I hated the way everyone cheered when the mother killed Christian Bale's character but retrospectively, I realize that, at least in that case, she trusted Justice first, and it proved her wrong. Here, Jackson did his own justice and to support his action, the script brandishes the race flag, and race becomes the convenient alibi for every issue. Even the climactic summation invites people to imagine the crime on a white girl, but when you think about it, you realize that if that's the way to earn the jury's empathy, then there's something really rotten, not on the justice system, but on the South mentalities. I'm not sure it's that "black or white". And I wish the film had played fair with the plot to give us the right ending: so, the father is "innocent"? Of what?

He did kill them, didn't he? He pleaded insanity, so was he or was he not? If he had been given one year or two years of jails, or a suspended sentence, that would have been a realistic ending and a victory of Brigance, but no, he's acquitted, so the Justice system admits that he was right to act on his own terms, out of insanity, grief, pain whatever you call it. I stop here. I really liked the performances of McConaughey and Jackson but the more I dig in the plot, the less reasons to admire it, I see. It is really not a good script, and it could easily have been one of the best.


Darth Vader is scary and I  The Godfather