Marshall

With the death of Chadwick Boseman, I decided that I wanted to watch more of his film lexicon, as such I decided to watch the film known as Marshall. Having watched the film I was very disappointed, of all the films they could have made to celebrate Thurgood Marshall, this was the one they made? To be clear this wasn’t because of bad acting, Chadwick Boseman and Josh Gad did a perfectly fine job, as did Sterling K Brown. So, what was wrong with the film then? To put it frankly the main issue was the case, Thurgood Marshal had a long and storied career, with several cases even ending up in the Supreme Court, there was a case in which he was almost narrowly lynched. Several where he had to be brought into town in a hearse, sleeping in different houses each night to make sure he wasn’t found. Out of the incredibly large Lexicon of his cases, they chose the one case in which Thurgood Marshall wasn’t allowed to talk. One of the most gifted orators of the twentieth century, and they pick the case where he wasn’t allowed to talk. Did the writers have such little faith in themselves to accurately write the words of Marshall? or did the producers? As a result we wind up with yet another movie in which the Black Person makes an unlikely friendship with a white guy, who understands, golly gee, I guess dealing with racism is a lot more important than i thought. It shows how this white man gains a great deal of respect for Thurgood Marshall, but nothing Thurgood Marshall does in the film makes him seem like a man very worthy of respect. The relationship between Josh Gad’s character, whose name escapes me, and Marshall is actively antagonistic. Gad’s character knows nothing about criminal procedure, and as such Marshall has to actively teach him, and Marshall isn’t much of a teacher. Now the second biggest issue with the case, is in this era of me too, did you really have to make a film about a false rape accusation? The amount of women who simply don’t come forward with their cases because they think no one will believe them is staggering. To the movie’s credit, they don’t ask any of the awful questions, e.g what was she wearing? Did she actively say no to the sex? But that doesn’t make the inherent case matter any more appropriate in a modern film. The case was a real one that existed, but to choose to highlight it is to cast light on an issue that is no longer quite as prevalent. Instead it casts light on the now far lesser occurring false accusation, this isn’t to say that false accusation cases don’t exist. It is to say that to propagate them, and to tout them in film makes them seem more important and widespread than they are. Just as the Jaws films gave rise to an unreasonable fear of sharks, so to do films like this in the prevalence of false reporting of rape cases. To conclude, I am disappointed in the people who made this film for picking this case, out of the many they could have.