Time to Kill, A (1996)

Daniel R. Baker (daniel.baker@hg-law.com)
Missouri, U.S.A.

Date: 5 October 1999
Summary: Ham-handed, simplistic, but not completely worthless

I read Grisham's novel before I saw the movie. Both novel and movie are severely flawed; what is interesting is how *differently* they are flawed.

The plot of A TIME TO KILL is simple. Two vile white thugs brutally rape and try to murder a little black girl near a small Mississippi town. They are caught, but before they can be tried, the girl's father, Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L. Jackson) guns them down on the courthouse steps, accidentally wounding a white deputy in the process. Hailey hires attorney Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) to defend him; Brigance is put through the standard wringer of difficult relations with his client, threats against his family and home, and a judicial deck that is stacked against him.

The chief flaw of Grisham's original novel is that it has no sympathetic characters; even Hailey ends up looking cowardly and dishonest. The chief flaw of the movie is that the heroes are too perfect. Even Oliver Platt's character never does anything really despicable. Grisham's original novel realistically portrays lawyering as a profession that crushes idealism mercilessly, but the movie shows Brigance as a starry-eyed sentimentalist out to "save the world one case at a time."

The best part of Schumacher's A TIME TO KILL is Samuel L. Jackson's performance. While Grisham's Hailey seems to kill the rapists just because he thinks he can get away with it, Jackson makes it clear that he wants these two men dead even if it means he will be convicted or even executed for it. Nothing less will satisfy him, his pain and rage are so great. He is also pleasingly intelligent, another trait lacking in Grisham's Hailey, as is shown when he out-manipulates some NAACP characters who are trying to manipulate him. I shared, and I think most viewers could share, Jackson's rage in the line, "Yes, they deserved to die, and I hope they burn in Hell!"

There is no question that, according to clearly defined legal standards, Hailey is guilty of murder. Brigance's insanity defense is designed to give the jury a legal excuse to acquit; neither Brigance nor anybody else believes that Hailey is or was actually nuts. This is in no way unrealistic; juries can and do ignore the law and facts to suit their own feelings, as can be seen from the O.J. Simpson case, the Scottsboro case, and numerous cases of "Texas self-defense" (the popular term for the tendency of Texan juries to acquit men who murder their wives for infidelity). I can honestly say that if I were on Hailey's jury, I would never have voted to convict him, regardless of whether the law required me to do so. I could not live with Hailey's blood on my hands.

But A TIME TO KILL steadily degenerates into a series of rah-rah crowd-pleasing scenes and go-get-'em speeches delivered by McConaughey and Donald Sutherland (Brigance's disbarred mentor). A scene involving a dog dredges up bad memories from INDEPENDENCE DAY, and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman's efforts to set up the triumph-against-the-odds scenario are so blatantly transparent that the movie ends up being laughable by the end. Sandra Bullock's character is even more uselessly tacked-on than Demi Moore's in A FEW GOOD MEN.

The climax is one absurdity after another. A criminal is suddenly caught despite the total absence of any evidence leading to him; Brigance's wife returns to him for no reason that didn't already apply. Brigance gives a closing statement, in which he asks the jury to imagine that the victim of the rape was white. What is the point of this argument? To any decent person, raping a black girl is just as bad as raping a white one. If the jury somehow felt that this monstrous crime was justifiable because the victim was black, how would that despicable attitude be changed by Brigance exhorting them to imagine that she were white?

Jackson has a speech at the end which essentially boils down to accusing Brigance of being a racist, because he doesn't come over to Hailey's neighborhood and visit. I have a serious problem with this line of thinking; for people to visit each other's neighborhoods because of their race rather than because of their individual qualities would take the country no closer to Martin Luther King's dream of judging people by their character rather than their skin color. But supposing Hailey has a valid point, the movie's answer to it, where Brigance's family does come over to visit Hailey's amid much pompous drum-beating, smacks of pure condescension rather than genuine neighborliness.

The lawyerly realism of Grisham's novel is not completely lost; the emphasis on jury-selection tactics mostly survives into the movie. There is a good scene where one of the State's star witnesses turns out not to be as helpful as the prosecutor had hoped.

The acting is good. Jackson, as described above, is mesmerizing. Matthew McConaughey is not dazzling, but is sincere. Kevin Spacey does a superb job as the bloodthirsty prosecutor. Patrick McGoohan's voice cannot be plausibly disguised as Southern, and he appears to phone in his performance. Kiefer Sutherland delivers his patented psycho performance, which he does about as well as usual.

Racism is an ugly thing with ugly consequences; it is ill treated by Goldsman's treacle. Say what you will about MISSISSIPPI BURNING, but there was nothing sugar-coated about Parker's movie. And of course A TIME TO KILL doesn't even approach TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. The most interesting parallel to Schumacher's work is the TV movie OUTRAGE!, whose theme was identical except that the rapist was black and the outraged father white, and that the father killed the rapist only after he had been set free. The conclusions reached were otherwise exactly the same as in A TIME TO KILL.

Rating: ** out of ****.