The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review

'The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till' brings a brutal case home

By BOB LONGINO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A testament to the power of film, the emotion-churning documentary "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" blazes on screen with white-hot truth.

Fifty years ago, Till, an African-American teen from Chicago visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta, was abducted, tortured and lynched, apparently for whistling at a white woman outside her husband's store in tiny Money, Miss. No one has ever been convicted in his death.

THINKfilm

'The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till'

A-

The verdict: A moving documentary about a defining moment in the civil rights movement. Its a film that cries out for justice.

Directors: Keith A. Beauchamp, Keith Beauchamp
Run time: 70 minutes
Release date: August 17, 2005
Rating: Not rated

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But because Brooklyn documentarian Keith Beauchamp made this film — tracking down and interviewing previously unheard witnesses and igniting a national movement for justice — federal authorities have reopened the case.

Since that investigation is ongoing, much of what Beauchamp has uncovered in his 10-year quest to tell Till's story isn't in his movie. (The filmmaker concedes that and says a second, more complete documentary is likely).

But what is onscreen slowly and meticulously digs ever deeper into the disturbing culture that ruled rural Mississippi in 1955.

Beauchamp's approach is simple. He mostly aims his camera at family members and witnesses, letting their words relate with unblinking honesty the story's pure horror.

Till, after all, was brutalized almost beyond recognition. His head beaten, chopped, shot. His neck wrapped in barbed wire tethered to a 70-pound cotton gin fan. His body tossed into the Tallahatchie River.

In its most startling moment, "Untold" reveals the infamous photo of Till's ravaged face, the image his mother, the late Mamie Till Mobley, insisted the world witness when she demanded his casket be open at his funeral.

That image is at once horrible and heartbreaking, frightening and soul-shattering. It will pierce your heart.

"Untold" begins exactly where it should — with Till's mother sitting on a sofa and recalling in intimate detail her son's birth, their relationship and his love of life.

Mobley is present throughout the film, revealing her thoughts, emotions and fears. Never bitter, but stalwart and insistent, she appears as a woman determined to make meaning out of tragedy.

There is ample archival footage, including court scenes in Sumner, Miss., at the Sept. 1955 trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the two white men now deceased who were charged in Till's death but acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. Moviegoers also see footage of African-Americans who testified at the trial in an era of racial subjugation.

There are interviews with cousins, friends and others, some who have never spoken publicly about what they saw or heard the night Till was abducted.

Simeon Wright was a young boy sleeping next to Till in bed when at least two white men, at least one armed with a pistol, arrived in the dead of night to take his cousin. Wright tells how he woke up, kept his eyes open and imagined at first why those men had come.

"I thought," Wright says, recalling his own youthful innocence, "'Maybe they are gonna take him home.'"