As a performer, Jamie Foxx seems almost unfair. There are plenty of actors with skill for both comedy and drama, but few make it look as effortless as Foxx, who can shift between both with great alacrity (making no mention of his unimpeachable talent as a singer). Winning the Academy Award almost twenty years ago, Foxx has the seductive talent of a meteoric movie star, but that kind of superstardom always alluded him. A generous scene partner, Foxx was always willing to be upstaged by the likes of Tom Cruise, Michael B. Jordan, and even Gerard Butler. Perhaps he prefers taking the more supportive roles, though when you watch Ray, it’s hard to understand why he’d be willing to share screen time with anyone. The Burial is Foxx’s best role in years, and it’s a welcome reminder of how much we’ve missed him in this mode.

The Burial got a tepid theatrical release in early October before being put directly onto Prime Video. It appears that this is the ultimate destination for these kinds of actor-first, mid-budget adult dramas. Formerly the bread-and-butter of Hollywood, they’ve now become the afterthought of an industry desperate for megabillions instead of megamillions. So perhaps that makes me a bit more sympathetic to The Burial, a film that at times can be overly sentimental about its characters and a bit simplistic about the complicated racial dynamics within its plot. This is a movie painted in broad strokes for a mainstream audience. It’s themes are obvious and its statements of purpose are blunt. You’re quite certain how this movie will end by the time you get to the ten-minute mark, but the gift of a film like The Burial is that it feels more like a comfort than a spoiler.

Foxx plays a real-life lawyer Willie E. Gary. When we meet him, he’s preaching vociferously at the head of a baptist church. Decked out in a flashy suit, a gleaming watch, and a pair of glasses with intricately-designed, gold-plated frames, he’s projecting prosperity. Gary is a personal injury lawyer out of Florida, whose specialty is helping black clients exact crushing amounts of money from corporate defendants. His technique is fiery and his style is gauche. Subtlety is not his strong suit. His success has afforded him a mansion, a private jet, and a complimentary segment on TV’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Gary’s image outside the courtroom goes hat-in-hand with his delivery inside of it. He projects the idealized image of what all his clients could be, and he plans to get them the money that helps them get there.

Which makes him a very strange choice to represent Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), a seventy-five year-old white man from Mississippi. O’Keefe owns nine funeral homes throughout the state, as well as a funeral insurance company. The business has been family-owned for decades, and it’s his number one dream to continue that tradition and pass it along to his own children. After a string of poor business deals places O’Keefe in extreme debt, he becomes desperate for cash. Under the advisement of his lawyer Mike (Alan Ruck), he decides to meet with Raymond Loewen (Bill Camp), the owner of a corporate funeral services company, who agrees to purchase three of O’Keefe’s funeral homes to provide him the funding for his remaining six. The deal is agreed in principal, and O’Keefe even signs on the dotted line.

But Loewen drags his feet for weeks, then months. A sinister reality becomes obvious: Loewen plans to instead wait out O’Keefe’s road to bankruptcy and buy the entire enterprise for peanuts. Hal Dockins (Mamoudou Athie), a young lawyer and friend of O’Keefe’s son, decides to convince O’Keefe to take a different course of action: sue Loewen and hire Gary to represent him. Dockins, himself a black lawyer, understands the significance in getting Gary: a high-profile black lawyer would be fortuitous in Hinds County, Mississippi, where a majority of the town (and, presumably, a majority of the jury) is black. When they meet Gary, he is skeptical. For one, he doesn’t specialize in contract law. What does he get out of this case but the risk of losing? And furthermore, losing for a white man?

It’s Hal who convinces Gary that this case can propel him from the superficial world of personal injury and into the immortality of corporate law. Playing into Gary’s ego is the right tact and Gary agrees, sparking an awkward legal team made of Gary’s disruptive panaché and Mike’s good ol’ boy institutionalism. Understanding O’Keefe’s legal strategy, Loewen hires his own black lawyer, a steely, Harvard-educated woman named Mame Downes (Jurnee Smollett), known as “the python” for her vicious cross-examination style. When The Burial finally makes its way to the courtroom – where it spends a majority of its running time – the film becomes more predictable, less dependent on its characters and more so on legal movie tropes. The script (by director Maggie Betts, as well as Doug Wright) seems to occasionally be burdened by the actual facts of the story, as it fits sometimes uncomfortably into the film’s larger themes of racial prejudice and how it can be weaponized against white malfeasance.

This is a movie defined by the professionalism of its cast. Smollett and Athie, the two younger stars of the main cast, excel in understanding the parameters of their character, and making peace with the fact that they’re both underwritten. Camp and Ruck, two veteran supporting actors, play examples of latent racism disguising itself as folksy, small town humility. Then there’s Tommy Lee Jones, whose weathered face has always been his greatest asset, an expression that seems to hold everything and nothing all at the same time. At 77, Jones has never looked more weathered than he does now, and the more crevices he adds, the more substantial his expression becomes. Jeremiah O’Keefe is a stoic man, silently principled, and you cast Jones in this role because he can translate all this in as little words as possible.

But this is the Jamie Foxx show, a terrific showcase for everything he can deliver. Foxx takes the tacky Willie E. Gary and turns him into a spectacle. His arc from glorified ambulance chaser to righteous freedom fighter is truncated within the limits of a feature film and The Burial falls short in convincing us that a prosperous lawyer finds his soul. In dealing with the racial dynamics of 1990’s Mississippi, the film sometimes loses its nerve, and decides to be a film that won’t upset white people (though I’m sure they’re still going to find ways to get mad about it). It’s Foxx, along with his solid supporting cast, that makes The Burial so watchable. He can convince you of the power of Willie E. Gary’s conscience – ultimately, the good graces of a millionaire. This is what movie stars are supposed to do.

 

Directed by Maggie Betts