Despite it’s B-movie horror title, The Burial is a surprisingly effective legal drama that gives Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones two wonderful performances. Based on a true story, it’s rises above the stranger than fiction plotline to show how two men from different backgrounds and of different ages who were both going after the same thing – that slice of the American dream they’ve been told about. And they were going to get it and keep it come hell or high water.
Set in the mid-1990s, Jeremiah Joseph O’Keefe (Jones) owns a funeral home and insurance business in Mississippi. He has a loving life, Annette (Pamela Reed), and 13 kids, 43 grandkids and 33 great-grandchildren. His goal was simple and old-fashioned. He wanted to leave his business in the family when he was gone. Unfortunately, some bad business decisions have left him in trouble with the Mississippi State Insurance Commission. So, on the advice of his lawyer, Mike Allred (Alan Ruck), he traveled to Canada to meet with Raymond Loewen (Bill Camp) of the Loewen Group, who offered to help it financially.
However, another young local lawyer, Hal Dockins (Mamouda Athie), feels that Loewen is trying to run O’Keefe into bankruptcy so he can snatch up his entire business for a reduced price. The Loewen Group is running a funeral home conglomerate all over North America and Camp plays him with the right corporate sleaze to know that he’s scum from the first scene. They meet on his high-priced yacht but despite Loewen’s offer, O’Keefe wants to make sure his family remains in control.
But when it appears he may lose the business, Dockins introduces him to Willie E. Gray (Foxx) a flash personal injury lawyer in Florida who is introduced showing how a black man who was hit while riding a bicycle while he was drunk deserves a $75 million payout because the vehicle ran a red light. Gray who looks like he could be a hybrid version of Johnnie Cochran and Creflo Dollar lives likes an extravagant lifestyle (with his own huge jumbo jet) and only takes cases in which black people are his defendants.
On the surface he looks like an ambulance chaser. And in another movie with another actor, he wouldn’t rise above that. But Foxx knows how to walk the line. Gray might look like a caricature but Foxx adds a three-dimensional depth to him. He’s not like Jackie Chiles from Seinfield. He grew up in the country the son of a sharecropper who worked his way up over the years to be a lawyer and even after he made it, he managed to fight discrimination.
That’s the connection that initially draws Gray and O’Keefe together that they both came from humble beginnings. But as Gray and his law firm learn that the Loewen Group targeted black communities, some of which were the same sharecroppers he was, it gives Gray the kick to go after the company. It also makes you wonder how this corrupt this industry is but we still allow it.
Yes, there’s racial tension throughout the movie. This is the mid-1990s in the South but it might have still been the Jim Crow era with fax machines and mobile phones. The O.J. Simpson murder trial is in the background and the Cochran connection is what Dockins uses that to entice Gray. And the defense counters by hiring Mame Downes (Jurnee Smollett), a black woman with can dish it like Gray. (This is a fictional character that filmmakers added.) The defense brings up the fact that even though Gray’s team is trying to portray O’Keefe as a civil rights leader as he denied a Ku Klux Klan rally when he was mayor, they point out that Allred’s grandfather was a KKK member. And Allred himself screws up by calling Dockins “Son” as well as the black people who work at his country club.
While the movie follows the typical legal drama dynamics, they have setbacks and feel all is lost before they realize they can win by discovering some new information, it shows you how in the post-Reagan era, the goal was for companies to take all the money they could and run. Of course, it’s irony with this movie being presented on Amazon Prime Video having been released through their Amazon MGM Studios. Funerals are that type of business that seem to prey on people when they are the most sensitive. My cousin spent a long time making payments on his father’s burial policy just to get it paid off shortly before he passed. I’ve had to sit in meetings where people requested pauper burial or that the city waive burial fees because it does cost to dig. Burying someone on the weekend cost more.
Director Maggie Betts who co-wrote it with Doug Wright have a lot of ground to cover in two hours. There’s a lot of characters. Camp never brings Loewen above the typical greedy Mr. Burns type. I’ve always like Reed as an actress but I feel her hiring was because she’s a character actress who they could pay cheaply and wouldn’t take away from Jones or Foxx in the typical supportive wife role. Smollett gives a good performance but she’s mainly doing the same role that Mary Steenburgen played in Philadelphia. She may not agree with what she’s doing completely, but as a lawyer for the Loewen Group she has to do everything she can 100 percent.
Ruck, who was recently in the news for a multiple vehicle accident, in L.A. seems to gravitate toward these roles. I wouldn’t say Allred is a flat-out racist. He is just one of these Southern men who was raised in an environment where racial slurs were spoken by his elders that it just caught on. It’s also hard to shake know why black men don’t want to be called “Son” because it’s right up there with calling them “Boy.”
As for the relationship between Gray and O’Keefe, it’s hard for it not to appear to be another old white guy learns the plight of black people on the surface. For a lot of people who live in the South, they interact with each other on a regular basis but never fully connect. There’s the obligatory scene where O’Keefe learns to jam to some of Gray’s music but they may sure to keep the cliched tropes at a minimum. Gray really does feel that he may be losing the case and O’Keefe’s trust.
But what really elevates the movie is the performance of Jones and especially Foxx. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Foxx receiving multiple award nominations, especially after his health issues this year. Looking at his smaller roles in movies like Horrible Bosses and Due Date, he’s one of those actors who can nail every scene he’s in even if it’s only one. And I’m sure Jeff Bezos has got the award campaign ready to hit the track as early as possible.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 