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Most Death Row Movies Are White-Savior Flicks in Disguise — Not These
‘Just Mercy’ and ‘Clemency,’ both out this week, right some serious wrongs in the prison-drama genre
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When civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) walks into an Alabama prison in the new film Just Mercy, his law degree matters less to the guards than his Blackness; first comes an unnecessary strip search, then the demand that the civil rights lawyer “bend over and cough.” Many movies might linger on the violation that would undoubtedly come next, using the episode as a motivation for Stevenson’s crusade in the biopic. Not this one: Stevenson shoots the guard a you’ve-gone-too-far glare that makes clear to everyone in the theater that this isn’t that kind of prison flick.
It’s one of the many ways that Just Mercy — as well as Clemency, starring Alfre Woodard as a slowly unraveling prison warden — is reversing a troubling trend. Over the last 25 years, death row dramas have singularly focused on the stories of White male leads and their advocates. But Just Mercy and Clemency, both out this week, present moving depictions of real-life death-penalty cases with incarcerated Black men and Black advocates at their center, and cast an unflinching eye at the racial bias ingrained in the criminal justice system.
The half-dozen death row dramas released since 1995 point to a clear narrative formula. After years on death row, a prisoner’s execution date is finally set. A nightly news anchor catches the audience up on the key background info on the case. As the clock ticks down, lawyers and advocates rush to file appeals and petition the governor for clemency — campaigns that ultimately fail. By the time the fateful day arrives, angry protestors assembled outside the prison engage in dueling ideological protests; meanwhile, on the inside, the prisoner meets his unjust fate, and ascends into martyrdom for the death penalty abolition movement.
Probably the most well-known and critically acclaimed feature about capital punishment of the last 25 years is Dead Man Walking (1995), an adaptation of Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir…
