MOVIE REVIEW: Bio-pic tells tale of early criminal case in which Thurgood Marshall battled racism

You might bring certain expectations to a movie called Marshall that you understand to be about the life of Thurgood Marshall, the first black man to sit on the United States Supreme Court. You might expect a certain solemnness to that movie, or that it would endeavor to trace the Great Man's arc, probably beginning in a childhood where certain seeds were sown and ending atop the mountain, with the subject looking both back upon what he has accomplished and ahead to what he has made possible.

You might expect a certain civics class seriousness to at least now and then seep into the proceedings, cued by swelling music and shots of our hero in pensive repose. You might expect a movie called Marshall to be at least a little boring.

You probably wouldn't expect it to present as a buddy dramedy, a sort of courtroom drama version of Beverly Hills Cop.

But that's what Reginald Hudlin has done with this film, his first in 15 years, a highly entertaining take on a pivotal case that came early in Marshall's career. It stars Chadwick Boseman (who seems to be the go-to choice to play great black Americans, having already fretted and strutted as Jackie Robinson and James Brown) as an itinerant lawyer for the NAACP, moving from town to town fighting against racial injustice and for the American way. This Thurgood is brash, cocky and highly competent -- Axel Foley with a J.D. -- and his work is too damn important to let little things like his (initially) reluctant co-counsel Sam Friedman's (Josh Gad) lack of qualifications stand in the way of it.

Marshall feels like the special movie pilot of an impossible TV series from the 1960s about a dashing young civil rights lawyer -- every week young Thurgood Marshall could descend on some blighted burg in Mississippi or Connecticut, encounter a mob of bigots and, through the magic of his cross-examination or some last-minute revelation, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the innocence of the wrongly accused even before the jury comes back with a verdict. Just leave the co-counsel to take the glory, Thurgood's gotta move on, as long as there are folks being oppressed and falsely accused.

The case chosen for the initial episode is such a good one that we might suspect the filmmakers of fudging the facts. And perhaps they do, but not in any significant way.

Connecticut v. Spell was a sensational case. On a cold December night in 1940, a Greenwich, Conn., socialite named Eleanor Strubing (Kate Hudson) was discovered limping and soaking wet along a rural road in New York about 15 minutes from her home. She told the truck driver who picked her up that she'd been raped (four times) by her black chauffeur Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown), who then drove her to the Kensico Reservoir, threw her in the water and tossed rocks at her as she splashed about.

Police quickly arrested Spell at the Strubing estate. After 16 hours of interrogation, Spell confessed. It appeared to be an open-and-shut case; the newspapers were full of lurid stories that emphasized the defendant's race. When Marshall first met Spell he allegedly told Friedman that he didn't believe anything his new client told him. (And the NAACP really was solely interested in representing innocent people.) Prosecutor Lorin Willis (Dan Stevens) was -- at least according to the real Friedman -- a notorious racist. ("He hated everybody," Friedman, as reported by Vanderbilt law professor Daniel J. Sharfstein, said in a videotaped interview late in his life. "If you were a Polack, if you were a Jew, if you were a wop -- this was Willis. He was a no-good S.O.B., that's what he was.")

With all those elements in place, it's no wonder that Hudlin and father-son screenwriting team Michael and Jacob Koskoff (Michael is a civil rights lawyer earning his first film credit; son Jacob worked with Todd Louiso on The Mark Pease Experience and the 2015 version of Macbeth that starred Michael Fassbender) elected to focus on this single episode.

Still, this isn't exactly a subtle movie; we can identify Marshall as a species of superhero from the first shot of him facing down an angry crowd in Tulsa. His preternatural cool sometimes clashes with what should be the deadly seriousness of the situation. Similarly, Friedman is early on portrayed as a simpering coward bullied into doing the right thing by his co-counsel. There's a formulaic rhythm to the way these two men -- the showboating natural and the plodding mensch -- partner and bond. You just know that Sam is eventually going to make Thurgood very proud.

Similarly, Hudlin can't resist the bio-pic trope of dragging in famous figures simply to have them acknowledge each other by name. ("Why look, here comes Zora Neale Hurston." "Well, hello there, Langston Hughes. Who's that James Baldwin-looking figure you're sitting with here at Minton's in Harlem?" "Why, actually, that's a young actor named Perris K. Forston who's playing a character named Billy Lyons, he just happens to look a little like the young James Baldwin." )

As a courtroom procedural, the film works surprisingly well -- the bones of the real case being as compelling as any John Grisham novel. As history, it suffices. But it feels more like a solid comeback for Hudlin than a tribute to an American civil rights warrior. Marshall is hip and glib, sharp in its pinstripes, a high shine on its shoes. It might feel a tad irreverent to anyone who goes in looking for a sermon.

But who goes to the movies for a sermon?

MovieStyle on 10/13/2017