Marshall: Super-hero Thurgood Marshall overlooked in his own biopic

Marshall is a courtroom-drama buddy-picture featuring an inexperienced white-bread Jewish insurance litigator and a rabble-rousing firebrand black lawyer. It's 1941, and upper-crust Connecticut is deep in the throes of Jim Crow. Together the mismatched lawyers search for truth, justice and the American Way for an African-American (Negro then) chauffeur charged with sexual assault and attempted murder of his white and blonde patrician employer.

Chadwick Boseman (Jackie Robinson in 42, James Brown in Get on Up, T’Challa/Black Panther in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War and roles in upcoming Black Panther and Avengers:Infinity War) plays the towering Thurgood Marshall at the beginning of his NAACP career.

Josh Gad (voice of Olaf in Frozen, Elder Arnold in Broadway’s Book of Mormon, LeFou in Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast) is Sam Friedman, the local Bridgeport nebbish lawyer recruited into assisting Marshall as he's not licensed to practice law in Connecticut. The judge (James Cromwell) permits Marshall to sit in courtroom and assist Friedman as co-counsel, but he is not permitted to speak. Whatever energy there is in this film comes from the interplay of the one who can cannot speak advising and cajoling the one that can.

Father-son screenwriters Jacob Koskoff and Michael Koskoff give us The Odd Couple meets Witness for the Prosecution, or better yet, Anatomy of a Murder, with a touch of To Kill a Mockingbird, when the two mismatched defense lawyers must represent chauffeur Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown) against rape charges brought by Eleanor Strubing (Kate Hudson). The bigoted prosecuting attorney (Dan Stevens) brings a Snidely Whiplash demeanor to the (melo)drama as much of the film consists of the varying testimonies of both the chauffeur and the socialite while the lawyers manage to cover and/or uncover the truth underneath it all.

Considering the incendiary circumstances of the charges and the contemporary reverberations — both racial and sexual — for our own politically-fraught and identity-fragile times, this film, directed by Reginald Hudlin, is surprisingly conventional. It's likable enough, but a ho-hummable and unconvincing look at one of the most accomplished jurists to ever sit on the Supreme Court. 

As a lawyer, Thurgood Marshall brought the moral weight of the NAACP into the American courtroom where he worked on case after case of black defendants unfairly charged, leading to his landmark work before the Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education. Here the court determined that “separate but equal” facilities that segregated black and white students in the nation’s classrooms violated the Equal Protection Clause and was thus unconstitutional. From Topeka to Little Rock and beyond, the nation was plunged into integration chaos. A few years later in 1967, Marshall was on the Supreme Court bench himself.

Where is that story? Where is that biopic? Where is that drama? Where is that searing, soul-searching, penetrating investigation of a complex man confronting an ingrained white-supremacist system?

Where is that film of a lawyer who articulated the inherent injustice in a system that had long contorted itself in support of the separation of black and white? To keep the races pure — whatever that means — the system said there should be no mixing, whether classrooms, buses, trains, teams, swimming pools, water fountains, hospitals, restaurants, hotels, marriages. The David who fought against that entrenched giant — and won — needs a film of his own. 

Marshall is not it.

Still, I suppose I should be happy for what it is. I was happy, in a way, to see these performances. Inspired maybe, in a way, to hear Marshall's stirring rebuke of racism, of judging a man by the color of his skin instead of the character of his heart. But I was also deflated, in a way, for wanting more of what might have been. The film is well-made enough, well-intentioned and workmanlike for sure, but there’s a period-piece fakery to the proceedings. The right costumes (as if they had just been delivered from the wardrobe department), the right set (spotless and immaculate as if the carpenter and art designer had just stepped out of frame), the right music (jazzy and wistful and forgettable), the right high-toned banter between lawyers in the sunlit burnished-wood courtroom, the right beefy yahoos with white t-shirts and menacing baseball bats, the right documentary feel of newspaper headlines and media attention, the right intercutting of stories (he said, she said, as first recounted to police, then as revealed under intense courtroom questioning, with flashbacks to the scene of the alleged crime), even the right, albeit bizarre, digression into a Harlem tavern where Langston Hughes and boyfriend just happen to be drinking with Zora Neale Hurston).

Each lawyer has something to lose and something to gain according to how this trial goes. There's an understated but stirring story here that parallels the struggles of blacks and Jews to become integral pieces of the American fabric. In one intense scene in the synagogue men's room, with Friedman at the urinal, a man approaches him from behind. You think he's going to accost him for representing a "schwarze" rapist but slips him cash instead. 

The ingredients are there but they never gel into a coherent, aesthetic whole that connects or transcends these granular pieces. Chadwick Boseman and Josh Gad are brilliant in their roles. I can even imagine another buddy flick for them. 

But Thurgood Marshall is the forgotten one here. He deserves better than he got in this film.

This article appears in Oct 19-26, 2017.