‘The Burial’ Will Remind You Just How Talented Jamie Foxx Is
He’s played superheroic gunfighters, supervillains, cab drivers, NFL quarterbacks, homeless violinists, vice cops, death-row inmates, the President of the United States and, of course, Ray Charles — all of which attests to the range and versatility of Jamie Foxx. But there may not be a role more suited to the Oscar-winner’s talent for playing larger-than-life, louder-than-God characters than Willie Gary. The son of a sharecropper, Gary was a Florida-based lawyer who specialized in two things: winning cases, in no small part due to his theatricality and his ability to charm juries; and praising the greatness of Willie Gary. He loved his wife and kids, he loved his mother, and he loved his personal jet (“The Wings of Justice”) and huge mansion and flashy suits. The only things Gary genuinely hated were racists, people who underestimated him, and losing.
We would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Foxx was handed the script to The Burial, writer-director Maggie Betts’ dramatization of what would become a pivotal case for both this high-flying legal eagle and the deathcare industry. (It hits Amazon Prime today after a weeklong theatrical run.) From the moment you see Gary preaching the good word in front of a congregation on a bright Sunday morning, you can tell that Foxx is going to have fun with this part. This is a gentleman who thrives in the presence of a crowd, whether it’s in a church or a courtroom; his summations, so full of humor and righteousness and an ability to TURN UP THE VOLUME at a moment’s notice, sound exactly the same as sermons. The holy spirit seems to run through Gary whenever he’s working himself into a frenzy, right before he hands his opponent their ass. The way that Foxx plays this real-life lawyer, Clarence Darrow would have taken notes.
More from Rolling Stone
Jamie Foxx Mourns Death of Friend and Actor Keith Jefferson: 'This One Hurts'
Jamie Foxx Is Getting Back on Track Following Health Scare: 'Finally Startin' to Feel Like Myself'
Jamie Foxx Apologizes After Social Media Post Interpreted as Antisemitic
It’s Gary’s knack for getting people cheering and his track record circa 1995 that attracts the attention of a younger attorney, Hal Dockins (Elemental‘s Mamoudou Athie). He thinks this hotshot may be able to help his client, a 75-year-old funeral director named Jeremiah “Jerry” O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones). A WWII veteran and former mayor of Biloxi, Mississippi, O’Keefe has run the family business of burying the dead for decades. He owns a number of funeral homes and sells life insurance on the side. A questionable financial decision has jeopardized everything, however, which is why he’s gone to Vancouver to make a deal with Raymond Loewen (Bill Camp). The Canadian has made a fortune acquiring funeral homes. He’s also giddy over the growing market of dying boomers in the U.S. and is prepared to buy him out to establish a toeheold in the region. O’Keefe counters with a deal for three homes, and Loewen steers clear of the insurance racket in Mississippi. A contract is drawn up.
Four months later, however, Loewen still hasn’t signed it. Dockins thinks he’s simply waiting for this small-business owner to go bankrupt, then buy everything up for a pittance. Though the young man and O’Keefe’s longtime lawyer Mike Allred (Alan Ruck) are preparing to file a lawsuit against the tycoon, the former thinks they need somebody flashy who can go face to face with Loewen’s legal team. Someone just like Gary. And though he normally doesn’t take on smaller-profile cases like this, there’s something about O’Keefe’s inherent decency that convinces him this is the exception to the rule. Plus, Gary thinks he can get the Canadian to pony up $100 million in punitive damages. Hot damn, we got ourselves a proper courtroom showdown!
It’s a tale of the little guy hiring the big guy to go up against the even bigger guys, and if you’ve read the New Yorker article by Jonathan Harr that detailed this real-life David v. Goliath fight, you know why Hollywood has been trying to bring this story to the screen for years. (Indeed, various script drafts have been kicking around since the piece was published in 1999.) That delay is both a burden and a boon for Betts’ version: This is the type of old-fashioned, star-driven court drama that used to hit theaters by the dozens in the 1990s and early 2000s, back when the name John Grisham was a viable I.P. It feels outdated circa 2023, but the fact that no one really makes these movies much anymore also makes The Burial stand out in a sea of superhero flicks. Combine your genre nostalgia with the fact that Foxx and Jones add a funky-meets-folksy comic friction to the proceedings, and suddenly it feels like this film has been spit out of a time machine. If you hired Grisham to write a buddy comedy for these two actors, this is exactly what you’d get.
And, as with that novelist’s bestsellers, the South is more than just a locale for objections being sustained or overruled. O’Keefe is white, and once denied a permit to the KKK to march in Biloxi when he was mayor. So is Allred, who seems to have a legacy of regional racism wafting out of his pores. (One character sums him up nicely by saying he’s the embodiment of “generations of white entitlement and privilege … in one single, simpering grin.”) Dockins, Gary, and Gary’s team are all Black, as is Mame Downes (Jurnee Smollett), the equally savvy and cutthroat lawyer that Loewen’s hired. Murals on the courtroom walls depict an antebellum history that some clearly view as glorious and others recognize to be demeaning. “Is this a case about race?” Downes asks at one point, and the question is meant to be rhetorical. Of course it’s not, but this is Biloxi, and Mississippi, and America — so of course it is.
It’s this notion that Betts, her credited co-writer Doug Wright, and her cast continually toy with and return to, even as The Burial strives to be just another folks-versus-corporate fat cats courtroom drama. And believe us, it does strive hard to channel that same feeling you got when you watched, say, A Time to Kill or The Rainmaker or A Few Good Men way back when, right down to the sappy music cues. (It’s an odd bit of timing that William Friedkin’s legal procedural The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial also just dropped on a streaming service — take these two together, and you essentially get a history of the genre from the Playhouse 90 era to the late 1990s.) You get the sense that the filmmaker — whose previous movie, 2017’s Novitiate, also plays with the conventions of a well-worn narrative type — is trying to juggle something comfortingly familiar and something a cut above the usual clichés via uncomfortable material added into the mix.
Except that throwback feeling doesn’t always square with the more complex, cringeworthy aspects of race in America, then and now, that the film keeps rushing toward and backing away from in equal measure. It does, however, play into the bits of buddy-comedy business that pop up when Foxx and Jones share the screen; save for Gary’s backstory, which Foxx delivers with the pride-and-pain combo typically primed for “and the nominees are …” clips, these two actors seem hell-bent on infusing their scenes with a wry, double-act chemistry. Sometimes that translates into watching a cross-generational duo tap into complementary comic rhythm with each other that ends up being the film’s secret sauce. And other times it means two movie stars suggesting that if we could all simply sing along together to a Tony! Toni! Toné! song, we’d all get along fine.
This particular needle drop doubles as a gag with a delayed-gratification punchline that’ll either have you cheering or rolling your eyes. Ditto Bill Camp’s late-act court appearance, which reminds you who the heroes are and, more importantly, who the villain is here. The requisite pre-credits disclaimers remind you what happened to the real people involved in this case, and you’re left with the sense that, at least once upon a time, it was possible for justice to be served. The reason to check out The Burial, however, isn’t to see a left-for-dead film category get resurrected. It’s a chance to watch Foxx in his element, killing it across the board. The movie may ping between social drama and IRL courtroom saga. Whenever Foxx struts and frets — and bellows, coos, rages, and waltzes — his two hours upon this stage, you realize that it may simply work best as a star vehicle.
Best of Rolling Stone
