“Objection, your honor, on the simple fact that she’s just angry!” That’s one of the funnier lines teed up by Jamie Foxx in the courtroom drama “The Burial,” which is based on a real case from the 1990s.
Jerry O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) owns a chain of funeral homes in Mississippi and the 75-year-old patriarch — decent and soft-spoken, but with a spine of steel — has one goal: To leave the family business to his 13 children. No mention of whether any of them want to run the business after he’s gone, but no matter.
O’Keefe also sells funeral insurance — that’s the real moneymaker — which means he’s supposed to have a certain amount of cash on hand. He doesn’t. And state regulators are looking to shut him down without it. To raise the money, he’s agreed to sell three of his eight funeral homes to the Loewen Group, a large corporation looking to monopolize the industry. Loewen’s yacht-owning CEO (a wonderfully self-satisfied Bill Camp) talks openly about how much he’ll make from the impending “golden era of death” once baby boomers hit their final years.
Quietly appalled, Jerry is in no position to object. So they shake on it.
But months later, the deal has yet to be finalized. The Loewen Group keeps stalling.
One of O’Keefe’s attorneys (Mamoudou Athie, matching Jones’ quiet, thoughtful energy punch for punch) suspects Loewen actually has no plans to go through with the deal, but intends to draw things out until O’Keefe goes bankrupt and the company can scoop up his assets at bargain prices. So O’Keefe files a lawsuit.
Foxx plays Willie E. Gary, O’Keefe’s unlikely champion. He’s a brash personal injury attorney who wins multimillion dollar judgments for his clients. Black clients, specifically. That’s who he’s focused on representing, and that’s just one of the reasons he is reluctant to take on O’Keefe’s case. A contract dispute? Not his area of expertise. But eventually he’s convinced.
It’s worth pausing to describe the way Willie is introduced, wrapping up a trial in which his client has been hit by a truck. He’s asking for $75 million. Why so much? “Because we have the evidence. The evidence will prove that there was negligence. Because no-good Clovis had one good thing going for him at that time, even though he was drunk, to’ up from the flo’ up, depressed and suicidal. My no-good client Clovis Tubbs had him a green light. I rest my case.” The courtroom erupts in applause!
It’s a ludicrous moment but it’s not a bad choice, stylistically, considering this is a man who owns a private jet he’s dubbed Wings of Justice. If only director Maggie Betts (who shares screenwriting credit with Doug Wright) had stuck with more of that energy.
The tonal inconsistencies — outsized and camp one moment, deeply earnest the next — tend to undercut the terrific performances from the cast, which also includes Alan Ruck as the white attorney on O’Keefe’s team (the kind of Dixie blue blood who has the temerity to be quietly pained when his racism is pointed out to him) and Jurnee Smollett, as the exceedingly accomplished opposing counsel who gives Willie a run for his money. When she shows up for the trial, one of Willie’s associates sums up their competition: “We got out-Blacked and out-womaned all in one go.”
I love a good paperwork movie. “The Burial” is not that. Nor are the legal maneuverings treated with patience and care, even as the whole thing devolves into something of a circus. Self-aware and full of bluster from the start, Willie quickly finds himself up against some daunting odds until the team finds proof that the Loewen Group’s business practices frequently rely on exploiting poor Black people. But the film never quite wholeheartedly embraces the kind of rhythms and story tropes — even as Willie & Co. are saving a case from the brink of disaster! — that legal dramas are built on. Strangely, we don’t even hear the closing arguments.
There are more interesting ways around a proven genre than “The Burial,” but I’m almost shocked it got made at all. Hollywood has been more interested in greenlighting stories that humanize wealthy power players instead, told from the point of view of the Loewen Group and its CEO — carefully tending to his traumas to better understand his coldblooded opportunism — with scant interest in the Jerrys of the world. But stories like “The Burial” have a way of re-centering our moral axis and they have a meaningful subconscious effect when you look around and wonder why things feel rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Big corporations don’t always win. Sometimes a stubborn belief in fair play — and the willingness to fight for it — actually pays off.
“The Burial” — 2 stars (out of 4)
Where to watch: Amazon
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.