John Grisham's legal novels inspired countless '90s films, most entertaining, disposable thrillers (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, etc.). Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill (1996) is too outlandish to forget. This all-star cavalcade of indignation isn't content with courtroom pyrotechnics but insists on making deep statements on racism. Among dozens of misguided Hollywood lessons on tolerance, it manages to stand out.In Canton, Mississippi, two rednecks rape a black girl. Her father, Carl Lee Haley (Samuel L. Jackson), kills the two in a courthouse. He enlists lawyer Jake Brigance (Matthew McConoughey) to defend him. The trial attracts national media attention and unsavory characters. One of the rapists's brothers (Kiefer Sutherland) summons the Ku Klux Klan for help; they begin intimidating Brigance and his allies. Undeterred, Brigance, plucky law student Ellen Roark (Sandra Bullock) and Brigance's booze-soaked mentor (Donald Sutherland) resolve to defend Haley.
A Time to Kill came out the same year as Ghosts of Mississippi, Rob Reiner's fumbled rendering of the Medgar Evars case. Crafting fiction, Schumacher and writer Akiva Goldsmith (the team who later brought us Batman and Robin) make that film's bathetic clichés seem fresh and enlightening. Never mind the legal particulars: Jake's argument rests purely on appeals to emotion that would be thrown out of any real court. Let's talk about the film's vomitous dramaturgy, which plays like a cross between Inherit the Wind and a Billy Jack film.
A Time to Kill treats us to the most evil reptiles ever to slither onto a film set. The two murderous rednecks throw beer cans at random blacks, sport Confederate flag decals and wear grotesque belly shirts. They could be headed to donate toys to the Salvation Army and we'd still hate them. Naturally, their surviving family turn not to the law but summon the Ku Klux Klan, who protest by day and murder by night as if we're living in the Jim Crow era. Not since Death Wish has a movie gone to such length to demonize its antagonists.
There's no crime that these chicken-fried hell spawn won't commit. They terrorize Brigance's family, beat up old men, firebomb his dog and shoot National Guardsmen in broad daylight. Then they tie Ellen naked to a tree so she'll die of exposure. Conversely, there's no indignity they don't deserve: one Klansman's immolated with a Molotov cocktail (!), while the kindly black Sheriff (Charles S. Dutton) repeatedly kneecaps his suspects. Every scene punches viewers in the gut, evoking elemental hatred then relishing evil's comeuppance.
This liberal outrage is perversely balanced by cock-eyed conservatism. There's no doubt of Carl Lee's guilt, so the movie treats his slayings as righteous and his acquittal as a victory. There's Dirty Harry-style slams on liberalism: Ellen is a naïve, self-righteous Yankee who's brought to Earth by our studly Southern hero and terrifying pseudo-rape. The NAACP show up, reveal themselves as race hustlers, then bow out when Carl Lee sticks up for Jake. Jake endures everything with stoic rectitude: on top of everything else, his wife (Ashley Judd) threatens to leave him, a subplot recycled in every '90s drama from JFK to The Insider.
What to take away from A Time to Kill's equal-opportunity pandering? The movie's less consciously political than shamelessly exploitative. There's no button it won't push, from the opening rape to Carl's hysterical self-defense ("They deserved to die and I hope they burn in Hell!") to Jake's tearjerker summation. It postures as complex when it's really a self-devouring exercise in audience manipulation. Yet this film has the balls to claim that racism can be solved with courtroom histrionics and peach cobbler.
Is A Time to Kill a bad movie? On its technical merits, not necessarily: Schumacher's direction is fine, and the wonderful cast (also including Kevin Spacey as the smug DA, Patrick McGoohan as a crusty Judge, Oliver Platt as Jake's legal partner and Kurtwood Smith as a Klan leader) sells much of the drama. Problem is, the movie's so false and incoherent that it's difficult to sit back and enjoy on the intended level.
