Lonely Soul
Danielle Deadwyler plays a grief-stricken mother in the impressive Till, which finally understands the loneliness of such heartbreak – despite all our best efforts. Ella Kemp celebrates this achievement.
“Everyone, leave us.” So says Mamie Till-Bradley, both to her partner and to the coroner who has just shown her the body of her son, Emmett Till, after he was beaten, shot dead and thrown in a river by white supremacists at the age of 14. Mamie invited the entire world to bear witness to this tragedy, but nobody ever understood it like she did. There’s a difference between seeing it and living it. That’s what grief can do: it’s the most terrifyingly powerful and isolating thing in the world.
So much of Till, the deeply moving and galvanising film from Clemency director Chinonye Chukwu about Mamie and Emmett, is about how Mamie convinced the entire country to look and to pay attention. But where the film thrives is just how well it perceives her loneliness in ways only such severe loss can create.
Even if other people see, only she fully feels it in her gut. Danielle Deadwyler delivers such a raw, visceral performance as Mamie that it’s hard to believe she really wasn’t the one to raise and love this little boy that the world took from the educator and activist who changed how the world really leaned to pay attention.
Chukwu is a master of focused loneliness, working with Alfre Woodward who delivers a similarly all-encompassing performance in Clemency as Warden Bernadine Williams, who disappears further into herself as work in a prison slowly eats her whole. It’s the kind of performance that usually steals attention from every other part of the film, and Chukwu is a rare director unafraid to simply let this take up as much space as it needs – like she does with Mamie.
Deadwyler’s performance is one of enormous weight, which in lesser hands could veer into the theatrical but simply externalises grief and its isolating heft in ways that are usually hard to communicate. Mamie keeps telling the world that Emmett was her only child – but she was the only mother he had. Who else could possibly understand?
However, much of the film’s strength comes from the universalisation of this feeling – you don’t have to be a mother to feel the terrible loneliness that comes with losing somebody you love, but here she is the prism through which to understand something everybody goes through but nobody really knows how to explain.
The singularity is conveyed in Mamie’s testimony, when forced to take to the stand in the trial that would determine whether Emmett’s death could be classified as murder, and who the guilty party really is. Chukwu, once more, goes for gold in the framing of this scene, refusing that the camera leaves Mamie at all during her shattering testimony. She is asked by the prosecutors just how she could recognise Emmett’s body once it was so disfigured, and she calmly, but strongly, explains how a mother simply knows.
Her power comes from both the script – written by Chukwu alongside Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp – but also what Deadwyler brings. It’s in her gaze, steadfast and unblinking, but then in the moments where her body literally vibrates in pain. Her eyes roll to the back of her head and it’s hard to tell whether she’s still in the room with us – she is, but only just, as this grief has fully taken over her body and has turned her into something else. It’s beautiful and devastating.
And the camera doesn’t flinch, because this feeling doesn’t flinch. It’s easy to romanticise a sort of empowering melancholy that you can find inspirational whenever it suits you, the viewer, to do so. But Till doesn’t hide from anything. It’s ever-present. It wants to involve us, because it’s so hard for grief to fully resonate with any single person who isn’t going through it. All we can do is watch Mamie, watch Till, to take a glimpse. To bear witness.
MASSIVE is hosting a preview of Till on Tuesday December 6. Get your tickets here.
