Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
zardoz-13
Before he played the lead in Marvel Studios' superhero sage "Black Panther," actor Chadwick Boseman played a genuine African-American hero in "Boomerang" director Reginald Hudlin's "Marshall," a sterling biographical courtroom yarn about civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall. As it turns out, this is the same individual who argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and then later donned the robes as the first African-American to sit on the highest federal court of the United States. It doesn't hurt matters that seasoned civil rights advocate Michael Koskoff and his son Jacob penned the screenplay. Interestingly, the elder Koskoff still serves as an attorney in Connecticut, where the trial took place in 1941, so he would know something about the hurdles that Marshall had to negotiate. At this point in his life, Marshall worked as the sole legal counsel for the NAACP, and his NAACP superior Walter White (Roger Guenveur Smith of "Eve's Bayou") dispatches him to all parts of the country to defend poor African-Americans who cannot afford an attorney. "Marshall" depicts the title character as a sharp, savvy, sartorially elegant attorney who refused to be intimidated by anybody. Boseman has a field day incarnating this historical personage. Neither Hudlin nor the Koskoffs reveal a great deal about Thurgood Marshall beyond his dedication to the rights of African-Americans in a legal system skewered against them. Indeed, we do learn about the problems that Marshall and his wife Vivien "Buster" Burey (Keesha Sharp of "Malibu's Most Wanted") encountered in their repeated but futile efforts to get pregnant. Eventually, she does have a baby. Nevertheless, Hudlin and the Koskoffs don't let Marshall's own life history interfere with the trial at hand. Mind you, "Marshall" clocks in two minutes short of two hours, but Hudlin doesn't malinger. The trial in question takes place in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The authorities have arrested a middle-aged, African-American chauffeur, Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown of "Brown Sugar"), for allegedly raping a Greenwich socialite, Mrs. Eleanor Strubing (Kate Hudson of "Deepwater Horizon"), and then throwing her into a reservoir late one evening. According to Koskoff, when the press broke the story, one newspaper touted it as "the sex trial of the century." When Marshall visits Spell in his jail cell, the attorney explains that the NAACP represents only innocent blacks. Spell assures Marshall that he did not rape Strubing. Furthermore, he has an alibi for his whereabouts when the crime occurred, and the witness in question turns out to be a white policeman who is prepared to testify. As the case unfolds, Marshall realizes that he lacks the appropriate credentials to practice law in Connecticut, so he finds a gullible but willing Jewish insurance attorney, Sam Friedman (Josh Gad of "Pixels"), to help him represent Spell. Friedman constantly has second thoughts about the trial and the dire publicity that may irreparably damage his budding civil practice. Nevertheless, he agrees to serve as Spell's mouthpiece. Meantime, the abrasive Judge Foster (James Cromwell of "L.A. Confidential") refuses to let Marshall utter a syllable during the trial and threatens to hold him in contempt if he does. Throughout the trial, Marshall must coach Friedman because the latter hasn't argued a criminal case. If these two strikes against our sympathetic, but snappy hero aren't enough, Marshall discovers about half-way through the case that Spell has been lying to them. Indeed, Spell didn't rape Strubing! Instead, he had intimate consensual relations with her, because her abusive, bad-tempered husband, John Strubing (Jeremy Bobb of "Boy Wonder"), often left her alone at night. Naturally, Friedman struggles to improvise, but he falls into too many traps laid by prosecuting attorney Loren Willis (Dan Stevens of "The Guest"), who is supremely confident that he will win a conviction. Of course, the good citizens of Bridgeport aren't happy with both Marshall and Friedman, and they go after them with fists. Friedman suffers the worst, getting beaten to his knees, and walking away with minor scars on his face. Marshall grins at him and points out that the local press lumped him with Marshall as a crusading NAACP lawyer."Marshall" qualifies as a well-made but routine courtroom drama bolstered by terrific performances and historical accuracy.
lavatch
According to journalist Will Haygood, Thurgood Marshall "trafficked in miracles" in his brilliant legal career. As noted in this film biography, Marshall was the "prime architect of the legal battles for civil rights" in America in the mid-twentieth century. He won 29 out of 32 civil rights cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. In 1954, he won the landmark case of Brown v. the Board of Education that desegregated American Schools. And in 1967, he became the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court.This superb film focuses on the famous 1940 trial of Joseph Spell, the African-American chauffeur accused of raping his white employer, Eleanor Strubing. Working with attorney Samuel Friedman, Marshall served as co-counsel during the trial that eventually resulted in Spell's acquittal.The film is successful in presenting the world of 1940, introducing such figures as Langston Hughes and Nora Zeale Hurston. The dialogue is crisp with such memorable lines as Marshall's succinct goal in his civil rights battles: "It's not the fires I'm after, but the fire itself." A fictionalized scene in a bar in a fight ensues results in a simple statement by a woman that becomes the catalyst for Marshall's understanding of the Joseph Spell case: "Men will be men, and women will be women."The centerpiece of the film was the trial, which unfolded with great realism. It did not seem like a typically Hollywood written court drama, but one that proceeded on the unbalanced court system of the 1940s. The screenwriters took great pains to depict the hurdles faced by Friedman and Marshall in overcoming the prejudice of the prosecuting attorney, the judge, and the jury.
