The Burial: A rousing courtroom drama
Review Overview
Cast
8Compassion
8Courtroom drama
8David Farnor | On 21, Oct 2023
Director: Margaret Betts
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Tommy Lee Jones, Jurnee Smollett, Alan Ruck, Bill Camp, Pamela Reed, Mamoudou Athie
Certificate: 15
Who doesn’t love a courtroom drama? Back in the 1990s, they were the bread and butter of cinema. The Burial, based on a 1999 New Yorker article, recounts the true story of Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), the owner of a small funeral business who is nearing retirement. Wondering how he’ll leave a worthy legacy for his 13 kids, he ventures into a deal with funeral home tycoon Raymond Loewen (Bill Camp). When the deal turns sour, legal proceedings ensue, and O’Keefe looks to get compensation in the name of all things decent.
The words “contract dispute” don’t exactly sound riveting, and that’s exactly the reaction of Willie E Gary (Jamie Foxx), a lawyer who specialises in personal injury claims. But Gary sees past the specifics of the case to a corrupt industry – emblematic of the whole country – in the business of exploiting and manipulating those less fortunate. The Burial succeeds because it also goes for the bigger picture: in many ways, this isn’t O’Keefe’s story at all.
Tommy Lee Jones is endearingly crumpled as the avuncular patriarch, motivated by morality more than money – and he delivers a generous performance that lets Jamie Foxx step into the centre-stage. And step into the spotlight he does, reminding us just how brilliant he can be when given a meaty role to sink his teeth into. Fresh off his remarkable turn in They Cloned Tyrone, Foxx is impossibly charismatic as Willie E Gary, a Black man recruited to play well with a predominantly Black jury, and also a man prone to referring to himself in the third person when he’s in full flow.
Needless to say, Gary’s showy courtroom style is at odds with that of many around him, including O’Keefe’s legal stalwart Mike (the superb Alan Ruck) and the plaintiff’s ruthless attorney, Mame Downes (a scene-stealing Jurnee Smollett). Director Maggie Betts – who co-wrote the script with Doug Wright – smartly spends time with them away from the jury as well as in front of them, and the cast’s shifting dynamics draw out nuances of greed, racism and inequality with a subtlety that the true-story label could easily obscure.
But this is dynamite material that Betts and Wright are working with, and with each revelation, the more shocking the scale of injustice becomes – and the more rousing the film’s cry for respect and justice becomes. The reulst is a stirring, brilliantly acted courtroom drama that reminds us just how good a sandwich can taste.