In last weekend's SNLC, self the loser e-chatted with one of the regulars about movies, where3CM was wondering about whether to see the new movie Marshall. The movie tells a story about the young Thurgood Marshall during his years with the NAACP, where Marshall got assigned to help defend an African-American servant accused of rape by a Bridgeport, CT socialite, in the 1940-1941 case The State of Connecticut vs. Joseph Spell. Ultimately, I did see it, at an early morning matinee last weekend, which turned to be opening weekend for the movie. It actually got a decent crowd, not a full house, but respectable, and understandably, the Af-Am audience quotient was pretty respectable.
The case in which Marshall gets involved is nothing as famous as Brown vs. Board of Education, which actually formed part of the motivation for director Reginald Hudlin to make this movie, as he expounded in an interview with Nell Minow on RogerEbert.com:
"NM: Justice Marshall had a distinguished and groundbreaking career. Why tell this story about a case that has been almost forgotten?
RH: Because it hasn't been told. A lot of people go, “Oh yeah, I know about the Brown case. I learned that in fifth grade,” and they were more likely to be dismissive of the film. But to start earlier with a case you don’t know, with an outcome you don’t know, with all the lower tabloid TMZ-esque qualities—it is going back in time but maybe with more contemporary themes.'
The TMZ aspects of the case are pretty obvious, e.g. the sexual predator stereotype of Af-Am men preying on white women. But larger judicial and social themes are obvious as well, like the automatic assumption that the accused Af-Am man, Joseph Spell, must be guilty of the crime (which means, of course, that we, in our later historical time, automatically assume that he isn’t guilty), as well as racist bias, not just against Af-Am's, but against Jewish Americans, because of the presence of Samuel Friedman, the lead defense attorney for Spell. The review by Matt Zoller Seitz from RogerEbert.com summarizes well some of the barriers set up against Marshall and Friedman in this case:
"One is a decision by the sitting judge, an imperious old white man who doesn’t appreciate having a cocky black New Yorker in his court, to turn Marshall into a mute bystander by declaring that only attorneys licensed to practice law in Connecticut can argue before his bench. This feels like an early checkmate intended to send Spell straight to prison: the NAACP only assigned Marshall to Bridgeport in the first place because the white majority had already made up its mind about Spell’s guilt and no local lawyers would take his case.
And so the hero is forced to use his co-counsel, Sam Friedman, an insurance lawyer who’s never tried a criminal case before, as a sock puppet. He works out details of their strategy behind the scenes, then guides Friedman during jury selection and opening arguments via handwritten notes, facial reactions, and irritated sighs and grunts. From here, Marshall turns into a mismatched buddy film, of a kind that we’ve never seen before."
Marshall is partly that, a "mismatched buddy" film, but also obviously a courtroom thriller, period piece and social drama, and a dramatized and reworked/fictionalized history lesson, in various proportions. In fact, regarding the history, Susan Dunne of the Hartford Courant had this recent article about the writer behind the film, Michael Koskoff, a lawyer in Bridgeport, CT with the firm of Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder. According to Dunne’s article, Koskoff learned of this case from a lawyer with another firm in Bridgeport, Jacob Zeldes, late of Zeldes, Needle & Cooper, about a decade ago. Down the line, Samuel Friedman's daughter, Lauren Friedman, introduced Koskoff to Hollywood producer, who was encouraging, but also basically said to Koskoff “Get me rewrite” (which I think is an old Samuel Goldwynism). With the help of his screenwriter son Jacob, Koskoff father and son produced a reworked screenplay, which eventually made its way to Hudlin’s attention. A Chinese production company bankrolled the film (witnessed by the Chinese names in the credits), and here we are, with the finished product.
In the film, Lauren Friedman has a cameo, which is a cute surprise. In terms of other cameos, not to mention the up-to-the-minute-ness of the movie, one detail that I didn’t know about before is this, again per Dunne:
“Lauren Friedman has a small role as a gossipy friend of Friedman's wife. In another interesting bit of casting, a couple who greet Marshall at a train station at the end of the film are played by the parents of Trayvon Martin, the African-American teenager shot to death in 2012 by a homeowner as Martin walked through a neighborhood in Sanford, Fla.”
According to Michael Koskoff, regarding the casting of Trayvon Martin’s parents:
"That was [Hudlin's] idea. He wanted to bring the whole civil rights thing into the 21st century.”
Interestingly, in the Hartford Courant later on, the review from Katie Walsh gives a different spin on one aspect of the movie:
“However, Marshall fails its audience in the portrayal of the details of this controversial and provocative case. The film asks us immediately to not believe the alleged rape victim; our hero, Marshall, believes Spell when he says he didn't do it. But the film muddies the waters with a series of unreliable flashbacks illustrating the various scenarios described by those involved her version, his version, and finally the truth. But the flashbacks aren't attributed to a source and the images are powerful. We don't know who to believe, and the film doesn't take enough care to establish the truth for the audience. One of Friedman's heroic moments comes when he questions Eleanor, demanding to know if she was drunk or lonely in her marriage. That victim-blaming doesn't sit well at all.”
Given that Walsh is female (well, duh), it’s understandable that this aspect and that particular scene would rankle with her. I take the more “scientific” view, perhaps, that what matters is the facts of this one particular case (even if presented in fictionalized form), rather than larger unpleasant truths regarding victim-blaming in sexual assault cases. Walsh does have a point about the film muddying the waters in the presentation of different versions, somewhat Rashomon-like, of the alleged assault. However, again in this one very specific instance, this actually turns out to be a virtue, IMHO. This is because Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown) actually has quite a few skeletons in his closet, which don’t become apparent to Friedman and Marshall until well into the trial. So Spell proves no paragon of spotless virtue.
In again a meta-sense, this actually touches on terrible recent cases of Af-Am victims of cruel police violence, where advocates for the victims painted the victims as totally spotless victims who would never hurt a fly – except that they had blotches, to varying degrees, on their characters. This makes them and their advocates look bad when the wrong side exposes that dirt. The point is that those police victims did not deserve their cruel fates, not in the least. But making the victims plaster saints after the fact does them no favors retroactively, if they were never saints from the outset. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Marshall and Friedman, after basically thinking to Spell “you (*#Y$&#ing idiot!” about the dirt in Spell’s background, defuse the risk of the dirt the only way that they can – by revealing it themselves in the courtroom first, rather than letting the prosecution do so later.
Furthermore, it turns out that there are shades of gray as well in the back-story of the accuser, Eleanor Strubing (Kate Hudson). So if Joseph Spell turns out to be no plaster saint, neither is Eleanor Strubing a cardboard villain either. (And don’t worry, there’s plenty of white sleaze and guilt to go around in this story, beyond Eleanor Strubing.) But to talk about this more would be to give away the plot, even if one can Google the case separately if you’re so inclined.
Ultimately, questions of political relevance aside, how good a movie is Marshall? Well, IMHO, this is not a "great" movie, not by any stretch of the imagination. But at the risk of faint praise, Marshall is a good movie, entertainingly told. Self confesses that I didn’t know anything about Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad, or Reginald Hudlin. (I have seen Kate Hudson in a movie or two, e.g. Almost Famous.) In other words, 3CM the loser was the most popular culture-ignorant person in the movie house that morning. Seitz, in his review, characterized Boseman’s depiction of Marshall as “more of a classic Hollywood alpha male badass performance”, which is quite accurate. Gad is obviously the more nebbishy character, in terms of having to be Marshall’s sock puppet at the start (obviously a clever, if none-too-subtle, reversal of the antebellum white-black / master-servant relationship). Brown does well as Spell, not making him a saint, but having a moment when, even though the movie has shown Northern racism to be its own ugly self on screen, Southern racism was infinitely more vicious, just through his words, rather than showing graphic images. Getting back to DK-speak, this movie is, unfortunately, in terms of hot-button social issues, all too relevant now. It would have been relevant anyway, even had B-o-b idiots not effed us all last November. But thanks to their short-sighted stupidity, this movie strikes even more of a chord now.
From looking at the box office figures for Marshall from The Numbers’ website, it looks $4.38M so far. The production budget says $12M. This means that, by the standard rough estimate that a studio movie needs to make 3x its production costs to turn a profit, Marshall would need to make $36M at the box office to break even, at least. In an ideal world, it would be nice if all the people who will no doubt flock to see Tyler Perry’s newest Madea movie would see Marshall instead. But movie audiences, across race and everything else, are what they are.
With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week….