It pays attention to issues of racial, religious and gender discrimination without wavering from its main objective: giving us an entertaining film about a couple of guys who are in way over their heads. legal history, but a legal potboiler dependent on teamwork. “Marshall” is not a soup-to-nuts biography of one of the most significant figures in U.S. What follows is a humbling experience for both men.
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(Apparently the latter is an actual Thurgood Marshall trait: he was suspended twice from Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University for pranks and hazing.) He's a bit of a bastard at times.īut just when you start to worry that “Marshall” is about to settle into a repetitious groove, with a know-it-all hero solving a nebbish’s problems, the full force of the town’s majority starts to weigh on the duo, freighting their work with paranoia and fear of violence. Supreme Court case, and claimed Langston Hughes ( Jussie Smollett) and Zora Neale Hurston (Chilli) as drinking buddies-that when he arrives in Bridgeport he offhandedly orders Friedman to help him with his bags, then pokes fun at him and plays head-games with him every chance he gets. This Thurgood Marshall is so accomplished at such a young age-having already argued his first U.S. It’s more of a classic Hollywood alpha male badass performance, in the vein of Humphrey Bogart, Paul Newman, and other 20th century white superstars who reveled in playing sarcastic, sexy, domineering jerks, but were so exciting to watch-whether orating, listening, smoking a cigarette in a jazz club, or just wearing an impeccably tailored suit and walking from point A to point B-that you enjoyed them no matter what their characters did. From here, “Marshall” turns into a mismatched buddy film, of a kind that we’ve never seen before.Īlthough Boseman is 100% credible as a brilliant attorney, especially when Marshall and Friedman are trying to work around the judge’s restrictions, his performance as Marshall is not an imitation nor is it overly concerned with giving us a true psychological portrait of Thurgood Marshall the man. He works out details of their strategy behind the scenes, then guides Friedman during jury selection and opening arguments via handwritten notes, facial reactions, and irritated sighs and grunts. This feels like an early checkmate intended to send Spell straight to prison: the NAACP only assigned Marshall to Bridgeport in the first place because the white majority had already made up its mind about Spell’s guilt and no local lawyers would take his case.Īnd so the hero is forced to use his co-counsel, Sam Friedman ( Josh Gad), an insurance lawyer who’s never tried a criminal case before, as a sock puppet. One is a decision by the sitting judge ( James Cromwell), an imperious old white man who doesn’t appreciate having a cocky black New Yorker in his court, to turn Marshall into a mute bystander by declaring that only attorneys licensed to practice law in Connecticut can argue before his bench. Many of the most seemingly outrageous twists are pulled from the record. Filmmaker Reginald Hudlin (“ House Party,” “ Boomerang”) adapts a script by the father-son screenwriting team of Michael and Jacob Koskoff that jumps off from a real case. Brown), who stands accused of the rape and attempted murder of a white society woman, Eleanor Strubing ( Kate Hudson). Chadwick Boseman, Hollywood’s go-to guy for playing important Black Americans, adds another icon to his gallery: NAACP attorney and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, a New Yorker dispatched to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to defend a black man, Joseph Spell ( Sterling K.