A Time to Kill

A Time to Kill (1996) opens with a father in Mississippi shooting the two men who attacked his daughter, in a courthouse corridor. Carl Lee Hailey is a Black labourer. Two white men assault his ten year old daughter. They are arrested, and looking at the history of that county he concludes they will be acquitted. On the day they are brought to court he kills them both. The trial stops being a murder case and becomes a case about the county itself. The Klan reorganises, the town divides, and the young white lawyer who takes the defence has his house burned. The question at the centre is whether a jury would convict a white father who did the same thing. The closing speech puts that question directly to the jury. It is adapted from John Grisham's first novel. He refused to sell it for years and eventually agreed only on condition of approval over the director and casting. Matthew McConaughey was unknown at the time and pushed hard for the part; the film made his career. Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey and Donald Sutherland are in the cast. Joel Schumacher directed. The sentiment runs high and it was criticised for reducing a complicated legal question to a piece of oratory. It runs 149 minutes. Good for: courtroom drama, Grisham adaptations, and the nineties. Less good for: the assault scene is very hard, the subject is heavy, and the film closes the moral question too easily.