Text Review: A Time to Kill (1996)
Once a book and now a movie, A Time to Kill is one of the most iconic movies of all time. The 1996, film began with an emotional scene involving Carl Lee Hailey’s (Samuel L. Jackson), a black man’s daughter being raped and almost killed by two white men. The film then becomes complicated when Carl Lee makes the ultimate decision to shoot and kill the two men in front of the entire Canton, Mississippi community. From there, the rest of the film is based on Carl Lee confiding in a young white lawyer, Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) to help set him free from the biggest capital murder trial anyone has ever witnessed.
This film explores the idea of racism and reveals how power and wealth play a huge role in cheating the court system. Throughout the movie, we can see that the prosecutor (Kevin Spacey) cheats the system by persuading the judge to keep the trial in Canton, Mississippi, forcing the idea of keeping an all-white jury, and sneaking around to find confidential evidence. Additionally, the film visits the rebirth of the KKK whose primary goal is to destroy the lives of those helping Carl Lee and initiate riots to prove a point that “no black man should be set free of murder.”
There was one major scene and two eye-opening quotes that really helped me understand racism and the term “Othering.” This happened when Jake went to visit Carl Lee in prison, and the famous line was “When you look at me, you don’t see a man, you see a black man,” and “… no matter how you see me, you see me as different, you see me like the jury sees me, you are them.” These quotes show that Carl Lee chose Mr. Brigance because he knew that having a white lawyer could potentially persuade and influence the jury to see the situation as if the little girl was white. In the end, Carl Lee knew the jury would never see him as the same or look past the color of his skin to give him a fair trial, so he thought of Mr. Brigance as his “secret weapon.”
While this movie is considered fictional the ideas are real and paints a picture for what those times were like for Blacks. Overall, I find this movie to be inspirational, emotional, and educational and if anyone gets the opportunity to watch it, they should.