A Life Through Film #027: A Time to Kill
A legal thriller that plays to both sides of the racism argument just a tad too much
Release Date: 7/24/1996
Weeks at Number One: 2
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
TW: Sexual Assault of a child, Racism. This movie really doesn’t pull many punches, so if you’d just like to skip to the bottom for the final verdict, here’s a footnote that will take you to the bottom of the page.1
The last few months of writing and sharing these reviews have been great for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important is that I’m learning a lot about myself and my abilities in the process. It’s been validating to learn that I’ve improved enough as a writer and researcher that a regular column, which used to call for months of work, now can be turned around in about a week without a dip in quality (at least that I’ve noticed). It’s also been great as a cinephile. The exploration of new films both as main column topics and as background for research has exposed me to a lot of great movies that I may never have checked out, like Blow Out [4.5/5] or Hard Boiled [4.5/5].
In fact, entire genres have opened themselves up to me. After writing about Primal Fear a few months ago, I picked up the book it was based on and just recently finished it. Even though I knew where the plot ultimately ends up, the gathering of evidence and emergence of critical revelations still fascinate me as I’m strung along from one chapter to the next. I still prefer the movie overall because of its great performances, but I generally enjoyed the book, and am planning on checking out its sequels (which the movie never got).
What is it about the genre that interests me so much? The recitation of precedent and twisting of testimony to find the truth excite me like they’re great action climaxes, not just lawyers doing their jobs well. I don’t want to pin it all on one great movie (I was an avid watcher of CSI and CSI: New York reruns as a kid, and loved A Few Good Men [4.5/5] when I watched it in college), but writing about Primal Fear for A Life Through Film made me far more interested in legal thrillers than I had been before the start of the column.
When I saw that this week’s movie was a courtroom drama based on John Grisham’s first novel then, this genre appreciation I’ve discovered was tickled pink. I’ve never read any of Grisham’s work, but his name has floated around my consciousness since I was a kid, basically becoming a shorthand reference for the whole concept of dramatic thrillers that take place during a criminal trial. Even as a child with no real concept of what his works were like, I knew that Grisham’s books were steeped in the criminal justice system and extremely popular with mainstream America.
This success as a writer, as well as the success of movies based on his work by the mid ‘90s, had the studios chomping at the bit to adapt the author’s controversial, yet wildly popular first novel. As producers attempted to convince Grisham to sign over the rights, a gruesome crime triggered the trial of the century. By the time the adaptation was finally released, America had spent two years pondering its dark fascination with race and violence. 1996 was already a great year for dark legal thrillers that broke new stars and evoked the national fascination with the OJ Simpson trial. What was one more to add to the trend?
A Time to Kill is a 1996 legal drama directed by Joel Schumacher, starring Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, and Kevin Spacey. The film covers the Mississippi murder trial of Carl Lee (Jackson), a Black man who pleads not guilty by insanity after killing the two white men who raped and nearly killed his ten year old daughter. His white lawyer, Jake Brigance (McConaughey), has to save his client from the death penalty and handle the increasing racial tension that threatens to destroy his home and family. That’s an incendiary premise for a big summer release, and tragically, its source material is based on true events.
Grisham was a young lawyer in his native Mississippi when he heard of the case that inspired his first novel. In an act of shocking brutality, a man had broken into a rural country home and found two sisters, one 16, the other 12. For hours, he beat and sexually assaulted them, later leaving them for dead. Though the man confessed to his crimes, the case still had to go to trial because the state was seeking life without parole. Grisham wasn’t involved in the case directly, but attended the trial as an onlooker
The harrowing testimony of the youngest victim nearly broke the future best selling author. Grisham personally fumed at the state’s lack of a death penalty, finding the crime the clearest example of the kind of evil that should end with execution. Despite his professional interest in defending the law, Grisham began to imagine the situation as though he were the victims’ father.
He knew in his heart that if that kind of horrible violence befell his family, he’d rather kill the perpetrator than run the risk of justice not being served in court.
Grisham began sketching out the ideas of what would become A Time to Kill soon after on legal pads, despite never having written anything like a novel before. The writing process took three years, during which point the story diverged from its real life origins. In the actual case, the victims had been white and their attacker had been black. Grisham decided to flip that dynamic, pulling from a case he had studied in law school of two white men who were convicted of a violent hate crime but received little punishment for it. Now, the story wouldn’t just be about vigilantism and the search for justice. It now explored race relations in the modern south, something Grisham was personally familiar with.
The author has said within the last few years that he still struggles with the racism he was brought up in. Even decades later, he has to fight against the instincts that were instilled in him as he grew up in mid century Mississippi. Confronting that systemic prejudice, still unfortunately kicking by the late ‘80s, was authentic to the setting of the book, even if it did add another layer of controversy to the book’s already incendiary subject matter.
The end result is a story that examines a fascinating question at its core: is there ever any circumstance where murder is an undeniably permissible act? Main character Jake Brigance finds Carl Lee’s killing of his young daughter’s rapists to be highly understandable, especially given his personal approval of the death penalty as a practice. And yet he’s forced to defend his client as an insane man, painting him as disconnected from reality to save him from death row. Everyone in the story knows that Carl Lee is only being prosecuted to the maximum extent because he’s a Black man, but Brigance and his team are powerless to fight this racism, even as the Ku Klux Klan revives its presence in the area in response to the case.
These are all thorny, touchy subjects, but they didn’t hurt the book’s success. A Time to Kill did alright in its first hardcover release, but exploded in popularity once it hit paperback, the ideal format for any thrilling page-turner. Its controversial subject matter turned a lot of heads and caused much discussion, proving that there’s no such thing as bad press. Grisham had found literary success with his first novel, but he never forgot its terrible origins. I an effort to keep the memory of his inspiration close, he passed a copy of the first edition hardcover to the judge who presided over the case that had started it all.
Over the next 5 years, Grisham wrote 4 more legal dramas, all of which sold like gangbusters and were adapted to film. Those movies, like The Firm and The Client, did big numbers at the box office, proving Grisham’s overwhelming appeal in general American culture. Still, despite many requests from the studios, the author was hesitant to sign off on an adaptation of A Time to Kill, still Grisham’s favorite of his own work. That brutal real-life background as well as the closeness the author felt to the Brigance as a character made Grisham hesitant to approve a big Hollywood production until a studio brought him a director he could trust. Luckily for Warner Bros, in 1994 they were able to bring that director in front of Grisham.
Joel Schumacher has a baffling filmography. I’m serious; as a director, he’s been behind cult curios, massive studio blockbusters, and critically acclaimed dramas, sometimes hitting all three of those lanes within the span of a few years. After breaking out in the ‘80s with hits like St. Elmo’s Fire and The Lost Boys, the native New Yorker started his ‘90s off with wildly different genre explorations each year. Schumacher dipped his toe into sci-fi horror with Flatliners, mainstream romantic comedies with Dying Young, and thrilling cultural critique with Falling Down all before reaching the midpoint of the decade.
In 1994, Schumacher directed the Grisham adaptation The Client, which ended up being a 9 figure success for Warner Bros. The author must have been a fan too, because once the studio proposed that Schumacher direct A Time to Kill, Grisham officially signed over the rights for his first and favorite novel (a reported $6 million check probably helped to sweeten the deal). Though Warner Bros. had been pining for this for years, it was to their benefit that Grisham signed when he did. Tragically, the timing could not have possibly been better.
I couldn’t find any article pointing to the exact date that this deal took place, but I was able to establish a bit of a background and work backwards. Filming began within two months after October 1995. Due to Grisham having final say on the casting of Brigance, the process of finding a lead actor took 14 months, meaning it was the last role cast before filming started. If principal photography started around November of ‘95, that means the casting process for the lead role started in September of ‘94. There’s no reason to think that this long road to finding the lead started as soon as the contract was signed, so it’s entirely possible the deal to adapt A Time to Kill was signed around June of 1994.
On June 17, 1994, OJ Simpson was arrested for double homicide.
Look, I know I’ve brought up the OJ trial a couple of times in this column already, but it was a big deal. The American public were constantly inundated with updates in the case and commentary on the various social implications of the murder trial. And the parallels between that case and the case at the heart of A Time to Kill are difficult to ignore, especially when it comes to race. Both cases involved a Black man accused of killing two white people due to a personal vendetta, leading to a firestorm of racial divide in how the trial was perceived. While White people were shocked at the barbarity of the former NFL star, African-Americans were 4 times more likely to believe that OJ Simpson was innocent or set up by the police. In Grisham’s story, the town of Canton is divided along similar racial lines, turning the whole trial into a larger reflection on the gap that still remains between Whites and Blacks in America.
Obviously, I’m sure Warner Bros didn’t wish that such a horrible murder had occurred in real life, but as the case went to trial and captured the interest of the whole country, the studio executives must have felt exceptionally lucky. They were adapting a popular novel from a proven hitmaker when millions of Americans were tapped into the legal proceedings of a somewhat similar murder case. The team on set making the movie at the time knew all this too. In a quote to Entertainment Weekly during the production of A Time to Kill, Kevin Spacey sarcastically pondered the film’s chances of success:
It’s about a Black man who’s accused of double murder, on trial. Hmm, I wonder if there’ll be an audience for it.
14 months is a long time to keep a movie from filming, but with Grisham granted final say on casting the lead, the studio needed to appease the author to get A Time to Kill made. Names like Brad Pitt, Woody Harrelson, Val Kilmer, and Kevin Costner were all considered, but never approved by the author. So who was the golden boy that Grisham finally approved of after 14 months of searching for the movie’s Jake Brigance? If you can believe it, for the role that the author most closely associated with himself, he chose a hot, talented, charismatic Texan who was primed to be the next big thing.
Matthew McConaughey was still struggling to make headway in Hollywood after his first acting role, his iconic appearance in 1992’s Dazed and Confused [4.5/5], didn’t immediately get him much high profile work afterwards. Countless auditions between making his own short film projects kept the University of Texas graduate busy, but he had to be bold to be the star he knew he could be.
A meeting with Schumacher where the director laughed at the idea of the relative unknown carrying such a big movie eventually turned into an audition. Once Grisham saw that tape, he immediately approved of McConaughey as leading man. The studio, exhausted by the casting process and now more willing to leverage box office success on Bullock after While You Were Sleeping proved that she could be a star, approved of McConaughey as Brigance. Filming finally began soon after.
Think of the years of work that went into the adaptation of A Time to Kill. John Grisham had to be convinced to sell the rights to his novel. The arduous casting process added over a year to the production timeline. As America still grappled with OJ’s Not Guilty verdict, this heady, controversial story finally found its way to theaters at the height of blockbuster season. All of that effort is clearly visible in the final product, but I don’t know if I vibe super well with the story at the core of the film.
A Time to Kill raises both philosophical questions about the validity of vigilante justice and about race in America as the 21st century loomed. The murder at the core of its narrative structurally resembles the many horrible cases of lynching that terrorized the American South throughout the 20th century. One or more men is accused of a horrific sexual crime before being killed by one or more citizens in an act of vengeance before the legal process could enact due process.
However, the murder in A Time to Kill is intentionally flipped, making the vigilante a Black man while his victims were white. Also made different was the legitimacy of the initial accusation; the NAACP says that many lynching victims were falsely accused of crimes such as rape whereas the rednecks gunned down by Carl Lee in the movie had already confessed to the sexual assault of his young daughter.
As brutal as this narrative setup all is, it’s necessary for the ideas that A Time to Kill wants to explore. Was Carl Lee justified in his killing, even if he was sane? Does that make vigilantism as a whole justifiable if the motivation is strong enough? And what if races had been switched? Would the state of Mississippi decline to try a white man who had killed the Black men who had raped his daughter? Would that be seen as more just and less insane?
These are big ideas for a big studio movie to pursue. And to A Time to Kill’s credit, it doesn’t hold back. The violence and racist language is harsh and disturbing, even off putting. The frequent use of the N-Word by white characters is accurate to the setting, but it still feels shocking, especially by 2024 standards. And the film’s inciting incident, the abduction and sexual assault of Carl Lee’s daughter, was so upsetting that I had to fast forward through it even if most of it is left to the imagination.
But the tone of the film is unfortunately inconsistent. The movie’s themes demand a darker, more serious depiction of its narrative, but too often the movie cuts to Brigance and his supporting crew having a laugh, often sandwiched between scenes of intense drama, racial violence, or both. As much as I enjoy Oliver Platt on The Bear, whenever his character, a somewhat sleazy divorce attorney, appears on screen in A Time to Kill, the movie detours into almost being a buddy comedy between him and McConaughey, completely throwing off the effectiveness of the overall tone.
That’s not the only way the movie does a disservice to the ideas at its core. Racial discrimination and justification for murder aren’t topics you should avoid in fiction, but they’re ones that require a firm stance to tackle appropriately. Too often, A Time to Kill attempts to come off as the enlightened centrist. Sure the Ku Klux Klan is bad, but the NAACP shows up and are depicted as a group of greedy, corrupt opportunists more interested in publicity than justice. The violence enacted by the Klan in the film is horrible and terrifying, but the movie really wants the audience to side with Carl Lee and his vigilante killings. Both he and the Klan take justice into their own hands, each camp doing what they think is right in the face of an ineffective legal process.
That’s a compelling split on the topic of vigilantism. But the movie never interrogates this dichotomy, instead assuming that of course we’d get behind Carl Lee’s actions. When the perspective on justice is skewed and inconsistent, by whose definition of justice are we supposed to act?
This struggle is somewhat tied to Brigance’s character arc, but not super cleanly. Despite the circumstances of his client’s case, McConaughey’s character is firmly pro death penalty and is forced to plead insanity even though he finds Carl Lee’s actions understandable, even reasonable. This doesn’t cause a crisis in philosophy for the lawyer though. Instead, the gap between his work and his beliefs is merely an annoying obstacle that he has to overcome in order to save his client from death row. Brigance simply has to trick the jury, not confront the reasoning behind his own tenets.
The tonal jumps and the unwillingness to commit to a strong take on its themes beyond “Racism is bad” for the bulk of its run time really soured me on A Time to Kill. It doesn’t help that the film runs long at two and a half hours, during which time it runs into the same problems over and over. I don’t envy the challenge of screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (who also wrote The Client for Schumacher) in trying to condense a 600 plus page novel into a script of reasonable length, but I can think of quite a few subplots that could have been cut down on in order to provide a tighter overall experience. The will-they-won’t-they flirtationship between McConaughey and Bullock and the half baked drama between McConaughey and wife Ashley Judd is more often than not melodramatic pap, rather than compelling character drama.
Instead, what they ended up cutting was the heart of the movie. Samuel L. Jackson is phenomenal as Carl Lee, filling the role with rage, sadness, fear, and resignation with every scene he’s in. He has by far the best line in the entire movie (“YES THEY DESERVED TO DIE AND I HOPE THEY BURN IN HELL!”), and later flips Brigance’s entire world on its head with one excellent monologue before the grand finale. And yet there are massive chunks of this long film where he is not present at all. Jackson is missing from a whole middle hour of A Time to Kill, and the actor has been vocal in his disappointment at how much of his performance was cut. In a great 2023 interview with Vulture in 2023, the legendary actor reflected on his experience with the movie:
In A Time to Kill, when I kill those guys, I kill them because my daughter needs to know that those guys are not on the planet anymore and they will never hurt her again — that I will do anything to protect her. That’s how I played that character throughout. And there were specific things we shot, things I did to make sure that she understood that, but in the editing process, they got taken out. And it looked like I killed those dudes and then planned every move to make sure that I was going to get away with it. When I saw it, I was sitting there like, What the fuck?...the things they took out kept me from getting an Oscar.
It’s a bold move to make your movie about racism against Black people in Mississippi and then cut out the primary Black voice in the film to the point of actual character redefinition. I understand the need to highlight the various members of the ensemble, but Carl Lee should have been the co-protagonist of the film alongside his white lawyer.
These problems at the core of A Time to Kill are a shame, because the technical execution of the film is excellent. The cast that’s assembled to tell the tale is top notch; beyond the primary four of McConaughey, Bullock, Jackson, and Spacey, you also have Platt, Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, Judd, Chris Cooper, and more. Everyone does great work with what they’re given, especially McConaughey. Even without the proven experience as a leading man, the actor proves he belongs at the front of a movie like this with a closing monologue so powerfully performed that it nearly raised my final rating for the film by a full half star.
A Time to Kill looks great too. Schumacher made this between Batman Returns and Batman & Robin, but none of the cartoon lunacy of those films makes its way into this more serious movie. Instead, the director pulls from the great films about racial justice in the South.
The scorching summer of Canton, Mississippi drenches everyone in sweat, evoking the miserable humidity of In the Heat of the Night [4.5/5]. The courtroom used in the film’s trial is a grand stage filled with arena seating, bringing to mind the classic To Kill A Mockingbird [4/5]. Shadows cascade through blinds and drench the actors in noirish shadows, calling back to the great exploration of crime in films like Chinatown [4/5]. Schumacher is by no means a minimalist when it comes to his filmmaking, but I found a lot of his visual flair to be tasteful and thematically appropriate in A Time to Kill.
So what are we left with? A more than competently acted legal drama that doesn’t pull any punches visually but fails to commit to its core themes until the very end. By the time Carl Lee tells Brigance that the white lawyer is still one of the bad guys in a racist system despite his best efforts, it’s too little too late (even if it’s true). If the movie was a half hour shorter I think I’d be more eager to recommend it, but with a runtime this excessive and a script this uneven, I have a tough time saying it’s a must watch. Maybe if you’re curious about the origins of Matthew McConaughey as a movie star I’d check it out, especially considering he’s great in it. Otherwise, your mileage will really vary.
If the studios had any concerns with the potential success of A Time to Kill, they were quashed with the test screenings they ran months before release. In an unprecedented result, almost all of the audience at these shows gave the movie top marks, indicating the potential for a massive hit. Immediately, the studio began building the hype around their new star. Schumacher compared McConaughey to both Paul Newman and Marlon Brando. The actor was interviewed for every TV show imaginable and graced the cover of Vanity Fair long before the movie was even released. America was told that a new star was being born, and they believed it.
A writeup of McConaughey in Texas Monthly around the release of A Time to Kill (written so early in the actor’s career that it includes a pronunciation guide for his name) paints a picture of an almost prototypical Austinite: he packs tobacco chew in his lip as he discusses capitalism with his friends while Mellencamp plays in the background. The only difference is that by this point, McConaughey was already dating co-star Sandra Bullock and was well familiar with the game of handling the paparazzi that would swarm the two of them when they went out. In a way, he plays the inverse of Edward Norton, who also shot to national fame after starring in a dark legal thriller in 1996. Whereas Norton avoided publicity and chose instead to let his work speak for itself, McConaughey relished in his newfound celebrity, building his own personal brand as the buzz for A Time to Kill continued to escalate throughout the summer.
By the time the film was released in July, “McConaughey” was the word on everybody’s lips. When combined with decent pre-release reviews (peep the Rotten Tomatoes score of 67%) and a continued general interest in the OJ trial months after the verdict, it makes the success of A Time to Kill not so surprising. Still, given the difficulty of its subject matter and its unproven star, I think there’s still some reason to be impressed by how much money it ended up pulling.
A $14 million opening weekend doesn’t compare much to earlier ‘96 hits like Twister or Mission: Impossible, but it was enough to knock a stale Independence Day from the top spot. From there, A Time to Kill kept the momentum for another week before finally slipping down the box office list. Still, the movie continued to make millions for months. By the time it left theaters at the end of November, the Grisham adaptation had raked in almost $109 million domestically. Its international release wasn’t as strong (this is a very American tale after all), but it still was enough to push the total gross above the $150 million mark on a $40 million budget. By year’s end, A Time to Kill was still the tenth best performing film at the American box office for 1996.
Awards season didn’t pay much attention to the film, but it got a few nods. Jackson was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance but lost to Edward Norton in Primal Fear. The NAACP showered the movie with acclaim despite its own questionable depiction of the group, granting awards to the movie as a whole as well as Jackson’s performance. Interestingly, A Time to Kill was also nominated for a Razzie, as it was put in the running for the special category of Worst Written Movie Grossing Over $100 Million. It had some tough competition though, and despite a strong effort it lost to Twister (disagree with the Golden Raspberries there, Eraser was ripe for the nominating at the very least).
Does A Time to Kill have much of a legacy? Beyond McConaughey’s career as a star, I’m not so sure. Anecdotally, I feel like I haven’t heard it mentioned much in recent years. Culturally we’re a bit more sensitive to White Savior narratives in our films, which I think has hurt this movie where Matthew McConaughey tells off the NAACP for not doing things right particularly badly.
It doesn’t help that the film represented the peak of Grishammania. The author has continued to publish books through to the present day, but he’s the kind of reliably consistent paperback writer that you often see populating airport newsstands, not a ubiquitous part of general pop culture. Meanwhile, no adaptation of his work has reached the top of the box office since A Time to Kill, including The Chamber, which came out just a few months later in October of 1996.2 The public just wasn’t as interested in what Grisham was selling anymore after July of that year, but I’m sure he’s crying about it into his millions of dollars.
A couple of the more recent books that Grisham has written have been sequels to A Time to Kill that continue the legal adventures of Jake Brigance. In 2021, rumors circulated that one of those books, A Time for Mercy, was going to be adapted into a miniseries on HBO with McConaughey reprising his role. If that’s still happening or ever was happening, there’s been no word of it in nearly four years.
A Time to Kill is a rare type of movie. Usually when a film takes big swings, it either connects and ends up as something truly special, or it totally whiffs and ends up an ambitious yet monumental disaster. Here though, Schumacher and team made a movie with big ideas and grand ambitions, but didn’t end up with either a massive failure or a roaring success. Instead, the big swing turned into a bunt that the fielding team erred in grabbing, leading to the barest definition of artistic success. The box office of the film guaranteed a long career for McConaughey, an actor I really admire, so I’ll give it credit for that. But unless you’re a super fan of him or the genre as a whole, I think A Time to Kill is a legal thriller best left undiscovered.
Rating: 2.5/5
What Else Was In Theaters?: During the second week of A Time To Kill being on top, Roald Dahl adaptation Matilda premiered in third place at the box office, its peak position. What a delightful movie. 4/5
Next Week: No legendary career can last forever, and in the next edition of the column, we unfortunately have to call time on Francis Ford Coppola as a mainstream director. Robin Williams stars as a 10-year-old boy in Jack.
See you then!
-Will
And welcome to the bottom of the review!
Did you know he wrote the book that would later become Christmas With The Kranks? Dude’s got range! That movie’s a 2/5 though.