Voices November 08, 2023
The Burial: a courtroom drama that’s a credit to the genre
By Alan Charlton
One of the most popular film genres is courtroom dramas. In films as varied as To Kill a Mockingbird, 12 Angry Men, The Verdict, and Inherit the Win we have watched lawyers battle it out in front of juries – usually, though not always, with the predictable result of the good guys triumphing.
The latest example of such films, The Burial, available on streaming services, does indeed largely conform to the formula while generally staying true to the factual story on which it is based. More importantly, screen writers Doug Wright and Maggie Betts have taken Jonathan Harr’s New Yorker magazine story and put an entirely new spin on it.
The story is about Jeremiah O’Keefe, owner of a funeral home in a small Southern town who, finding himself faced with a financial crisis, entered into a contract deal with Ray Loewen – a contract which the latter failed to complete. O’Keefe subsequently hired a lawyer, Willie E. Gary, who had no experience with contract law but had been successful in suits against a number of organizations, resulting in his being flamboyantly wealthy.
What unfolds is largely formulaic, though vastly entertaining, often comical, and skillfully directed by Maggie Betts. Significantly, The Burial is made more interesting in that that it offers a number of unexpected twists.
Perhaps the most relevant to Canadian viewers is that the person being sued is by no means the proverbial nice guy Canadian; he is the embodiment of corporate greed and chicanery, a man who conducts business on his multi-million-dollar yacht in Vancouver’s harbour. Perhaps more relevant to American viewers is that the writers have larded the story with a theme of racism.
Even here, however, the writers have come up with a new wrinkle in that all the main characters show their individual determination to succeed according to their own standards. Many of them are engagingly reflective of the culture in which they have been raised. Thus O’Keefe, superbly portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, comes across as a decent Christian family man, intent only on achieving justice and with no other motivation than to preserve his own family’s heritage and dignity.
By contrast, lawyer Gary is shown as flamboyantly engaging, a successful black man, happily married, unafraid of being ostentatious, and airing his success in everything from his own aircraft to expensive watches and bling. At the same time, Mamoudou Athie and Jurnee Smollett as competing lawyers represent the new generation of young black adults who are intent on success, willing to put in the necessary work, but still somewhat wary as they try to find a way to achieve it in a world which is inimical to their race.
The result of all this is that The Burial gives a new twist to an old story line, albeit one that largely stays true to the factual basis of the plot, making it both provocative in the issues that it raises and captivatingly entertaining.