'A Time to Kill': A war between the black and the white

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): Two foul-mouthed, beer-swilling rednecks, joyriding through the black section of small town Canton, Mississippi, spot a 10-year-old black girl walking down a lonely path with groceries in her arms. They throw beer cans at her, pull over, tie her up, rape and torture her. All the while she cries, "Daddy! Daddy!" but daddy is too faraway to be able to hear. They then leave her for dead and roar off guiltlessly in their beaten pick-up.

Although it doesn't take long for the local black sheriff (Charles Dutton) to spot and arrest the villains, it is common knowledge that whites convicted of raping blacks can be out of jail in less than 10 years.

With that out of the way surprisingly quickly, the main thrust of the story begins. You're her father. She is your life. What would you do?

Such is the question raised in the latest movie adaptation of John Grisham's novel A Time to Kill, directed by Joel Schumacher, director of two other Grisham-based films, The Client and The Pelican Brief. A Time to Kill is actually Grisham's first novel, not published until after his subsequent potboilers made him a multimillionaire.

Grisham has the father of the brutalized girl, a mill worker by the name of Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L. Jackson in an another truly elegant performance) gun the two punks down before their arraignment, accidentally injuring a deputy (Chris Cooper) in the process, and winding up with first degree murder charges. But before Hailey does all this, Grisham has him first visit Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey in an impressive career-launching performance), a young, broke, and inexperienced lawyer who once defended his brother. He all but tells Brigance what he contemplates doing.

Yet Brigance, obviously too busy thinking of bills to pay and a young family to support, takes the information in stride. Feeling justifiably responsible for Hailey's action, Brigance agrees to defend him -- a decision which turns the small southern town into a war zone between blacks and whites.

But Grisham's hero won't be Grisham's hero without morality thrown in. Not only is the hero brilliant, self-sufficient, driven, ambitious, and extremely hungry, but he/she always has a strong sense of what is right and wrong. So, although Brigance initially needs a big case to jump start his career, he believes in the essential rightness of his decision. Suitably confronted by the angelic sight of her young and innocent daughter sleeping, the moral dilemma is as much his as it is Hailey's. To him, the facts are clear and spell out impossibility: A black man is on trial for the murder of two white men in a predominantly white county. As if that isn't enough, the prosecutor is a ruthlessly ambitious and highly experienced local D.A., Rufus Buckley (Kevin Spacey), who intends to use the case to propel himself to the governor's office. Even worse, Buckley is cozy with presiding Judge Omar Noose (Patrick McGoohan). But what would he have done if the same thing had happened to his own daughter?

That this question is, in fact, the prime inspiration of A Time to Kill, is confirmed in Grisham's own introduction to the novel. He tells of "... stumbling upon a horrible trial in which a young girl testified against the man who raped her ... I wondered what I would do if she were my daughter." He confesses that his personal obsession with the idea of a father's retribution has shaped the novel. He also admits to there being "a lot of autobiography in this book," meaning that Jake Brigance is, in essence, himself.

The above may explain why, when it's over and that wrenching internal debate begins, the racial aspect seems to recede. Sure, the movie has it all: courtroom sessions with an all-white jury, even the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, reactivated by the evil brother of one of the murdered hooligans to scare Brigance off the case. Yet the story cannot be seen quite in the same light as the genre's classic, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. McConaughey's Jake Brigance may have the idealism and charisma of Gregory Peck's character Atticus Finch, but the latter doesn't have Grisham in his brain.

The presence of the Ku Klux Klan, while intended to underscore the racial tensions, has the ironic effect of mocking the organization's significance. The thing is that white supremacists are the Nazis of the 1990s and moviemakers love them because they know the audience hates them. Dead-eyed, overt racists like Freddie Cobb (Kiefer Sutherland) are the scums of the earth. Half of the audience is counted on to applaud the sight of Klansmen being beaten or spit upon, while the real complex issues such as the criminal justice system's entrenched racial inequities scrape through untreated.

While in-depth probing of black-white relations doesn't happen in this movie, there is one substantive scene in which Hailey forces Brigance to confront his own inherent racist feelings. The chilling truth contained in the scrupulously honest message is made all the more effective through Jackson's unemotional and matter-of-fact speech. It is as if he had internalized the gulf race places between them and accepted it as a fact of life.

A Time to Kill raises so many questions, but the acting is so persuasive that the material seems convincing as it happens. A huge part of it is due to 26-year-old Matthew McConaughey, the media pin-up boy of the moment. Though he is billed third in the credits after Sandra Bullock and Samuel L. Jackson, the movie truly belongs to him.

He has been compared to everyone from Paul Newman to Marlon Brando to Henry Fonda. His blazing good looks exude soulfulness, intelligence, inner strength and quiet confidence. But there is also an absolute ease to his acting, a natural screen presence.

With the exception of Jackson as Carl Lee Hailey, everybody else merely exists as sideshows. Bullock merely duplicates her annoyingly perky character in Speed, never bothering to remember that she is in a different movie. Her portrayal of a young and brilliant law student who is so eager to help Brigance is the movie's most unnatural piece of acting. Four years of college doesn't teach one to equate genius with her penchant for body- baring clothes.

Donald Sutherland is intriguing as the shambling and elegantly drunk Lucien Wilbanks, Brigance's disbarred old mentor. Oliver Platt also stands out as Henry Rex Vonner, the sleazy, yet totally lovable divorce litigator who is also Brigance's best friend. The interplay between the two is so natural and becomes a breeze of fresh air when things get too serious. Ashley Judd, playing Brigance's wife, Carla, gets all the unfortunate lines.

But maybe the real reason why A Time to Kill rates better so far than the other Grisham movies is that it is based on his most personal book. After all, he wrote it before he became a one-man industry in the legal thriller genre.