"The Burial" is the kind of legal drama that you don't see as often as you used to, but is so utterly likable and enjoyable, you have to wonder why they don't make more. Tommy Lee Jones plays Jerry O'Keefe, the elderly owner of several funeral homes in Mississippi. After the shady Raymond Loewen (Bill Camp) backs out of an oral agreement to buy several of Jerry's businesses, with an eye on driving him to bankruptcy, Jerry decides to sue. Because the case will be tried in a Florida community that is overwhelmingly African American, his young lawyer Hal (Mamadou Athie) convinces Jerry to hire a flashy African-American personal injury lawyer, Willie E. Gary (Jamie Foxx) to join his legal team. Soon after, Raymond hires his own African-American lawyers, including the formidable Mame Downes (Jurnee Smollett).
Set in the '90s, roughly around the same time as the OJ Simpson trial, it's safe to say that race and justice are issues on everybody's minds in "The Burial." The unlikely attorney-client relationship between Jerry and Willie is one that both of them have to be talked into, and is one that is questioned and tested multiple times. Jerry is a good, decent, man who doesn't have much experience with people who aren't from his own walk of life, but eventually proves open-minded and willing to try. Jerry may be the gentlest and most lovable role that Tommy Lee Jones has ever had, with hardly a trace of the famous hardass from his action movie days. Willie E. Gary, meanwhile, is far more doubtful and has good reason to be. Putting aside the racial dynamics, he's a personal injury lawyer, not a contract lawyer. He's also honest about the fact that his successes are largely thanks to his charisma and larger-than-life persona, and Jerry's case is well outside of his comfort zone. Jamie Foxx has been having a very good year between "The Burial" and "They Cloned Tyrone." He absolutely runs away with "The Burial" the second he comes onscreen, full of energy and charm. It's so much fun to watch him put on a show in the courtroom, become friends with Jerry, and clash against Jurnee Smollett's rising young hotshot.
And it's the scenes with Smollett that I feel like are really the point of the movie, smuggled in amidst all the feel-good scenes of our smart, capable protagonists outmaneuvering the unscrupulous baddies in a legal system that actually works for once. Willie E. Gary and Mame Downes are both African-American lawyers who have had to overcome a lot in order to achieve what they have. It's bad luck that they're on opposite sides of the case, but they're absolutely kindred spirits, who understand each other in a way that no other characters in the movie do. Between the two of them, they're able to lay out some uncomfortable truths and have a meaningful, interesting conversation about race and law and justice - a conversation that would otherwise be very difficult to have in this movie. I wish the story had been about the two of them from the outset, but then "The Burial" would be a very different kind of film, and sadly a far less accessible one.
Now, switching gears, let's talk about "Nyad." I feel I should get a few caveats out of the way first, since the swimmer Diana Nyad is a somewhat controversial figure, and it's not clear if the feat of endurance swimming depicted in this film - swimming from Cuba to the Florida Keys over 48 hours - followed all the rules to actually count as the achievement it's supposed to be. I'm always a little wary when films like this are made, because everyone involved would have surely known the controversy would end up back in the spotlight again, probably reflecting badly on the film. However, I was also sufficiently convinced that Diana Nyad is such an interesting figure, it doesn't matter if she officially finished her swim in accordance with the rules or not.
Annette Bening stars as Diana Nyad, giving one of the most physical, grueling performances I've ever seen in any sports film. Bening not only doesn't try to hide her age and hardly seems to bother with makeup, but is constantly shown with her features sunburned, blistered, chapped, bloated, and obscured in unflattering ways by her gear. The film begins with Nyad's 60th birthday party, and takes us through her multiple attempts at completing the swim she failed to accomplish when she was in her twenties. "Nyad" was directed by the team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who made the mountain climbing films "Free Solo" and "Meru," and they rarely indulge in beauty shots of their subject. Instead, it's her stubborn perseverance that's kept front and center, along with Nyad's relationships with the core members of her support team - her navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) and her best friend and coach Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster).
It takes a while for the film to find its groove. Diana Nyad has a difficult personality, and she's not easy to warm up to, so we see most of the film through Bonnie's eyes. Bening is great in the film, but it absolutely wouldn't work without Jodie Foster as the ordinary everywoman figure, trying to be supportive of an impossibly demanding friend. Every time the film strays too far from this relationship - into flashbacks to Nyad's past as a celebrated swimmer with a problematic coach, for instance - the film feels like it's on unsteady ground. However, when the film is in problem-solving mode, piecing Nyad's team of shark experts and weather experts and equipment specialists together, adding more and more information gathered from each failed attempt, it's riveting to watch. And "Nyad" knows when to be a crowd-pleasing sports movie in the end, with a great big, emotional finale that feels well-earned by the time we reach it.
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