The camera rests for long stretches on the face of LB Williams, who plays Mose Wright, the uncle of Emmett Till, and we sit and watch what he knows and we know is coming, but can't fully articulate it. Or, if he can, it's such a wretched and terrible thing to contemplate. But those moments he's in the bathtub, or sitting up in bed, or on the couch, that's what makes up the heavy emotional weight of this all-too-short but necessary portrait of what happened when 14 year old (a child!) Emmett from Chicago whistled at a white woman and had the temerity to say "Hey, baby" in 1955 in what might as well have been a third-world country but was called Money, Mississippi.
As soon as I saw the title and even saw the face of Mose Wright, I knew the story beforehand, but the remarkable thing is how much the filmmaker makes this a quiet film leading up to the white men practically busting through Wright's front door to take a sleeping Emmett Till out to be "taught a lesson". It carries that same fire and terror in those minutes that Bigelow's Detroit had, and no less a potent look at: yes, this happened, and it continues to happen. The quality of the acting, the camerawork, the sense of pacing, the music, it's all stellar and while emotional it earns every stroke is done through the subject matter but also that the sincerity isn't false. This could have been more like Parker's Birth of a Nation, but I think Kevin Wilson Jr has a more subtle approach than that, even in the biggest moments.
I don't think though the end of the film leaves one in total despair; when Mose Wright steps out of his house, this being the three days after this main event happens in the dead of night and he identifies the corpse of Emmett Till, he goes in front of the camera to tell what he saw. It may not be much, but Wright not stepping away showed bravery on his part, even if it was after the fact... no, precisely *because* it was after it, while still in Money, where he could have had his life threatened again, for whatever reason. From My Nephew Emmett the core of this isn't that there's evil in the world but that there is some good, or at least not shying away from the bad, that makes up the best of us.
