A Time To Kill, directed by Joel Schumacher, is a film that heavily relies upon empathy to captivate its audience. The plot is essentially a little girl, Tonya Hailey, who is raped, beaten and thrown off a bridge by two white men in Canton, Mississippi. Her father, Carl Lee Hailey, retaliates by taking the law into his own hands and shooting the two offenders in the middle of a courthouse. The rest of the movie is all about the trial of Carl Lee, the disunity that it brings upon the town, and the lives most heavily affected by the conflict. Those lives would be that of the defending attorney Jake Brigance and his family (TK).
The movie intends to place us on the side of our main characters, Jake Brigance and Carl Lee. We’re supposed to feel bad for Tonya and her family, so badly that we justify letting Carl Lee walk from the court room without any charges. The only way to do this is to appeal to our empathetic nature as the audience. While it’s important what techniques are used to provide this empathy, it’s just as important that the timing is correct, in my opinion. Joel Schumacher’s genius opening scene sets us up for exactly the empathy he wants. The two white rapists are recklessly driving around town, wildly intoxicated, and harassing the black community. These scenes are going back in forth with those of Tonya Hailey, buying groceries from the store, and Jake Brigance, leaving for work. By the fifth minute of the movie, Tonya is being raped by the two men and by the ninth minute, the two are being arrested for the rape (TK 0:57-9:09). It took less than ten minutes for Schumacher to convince everyone in the audience, beside possibly a severely racist white supremacist, to have a feeling of anger towards the two men and empathy for Tonya.
From this scene, the director is able to make us feel as if Carl Lee is justified in the shooting of the two men (TK 19:19). These two scenes allow the movie to progress into its full plot. That’s exactly why I think they are the most important scenes in the movie. We, the viewers, are invoked with a very strong sense of empathy during the rape scene. The camera is in what can be assumed as first person of Tonya, causing us empathize her situation. We are to nowhere near the same extent of pain that she is in, but we understand the situation because we go through it with her. This is very clearly a situation of real empathy. We are put into Tonya’s shoes and witness a rape through the eyes of the victim.
Without the empathy we have from this scene, the movie might as well start at the shooting without any prior context. As the previously mentioned white supremacist wouldn’t have felt any empathy, they likely wouldn’t believe that the two men deserved to die. If we don’t have this feeling of empathy, we cannot be the audience the director wants, and the movie turns out to be much less compelling. This scene motivates us to want Car Lee to be free, which is what makes the movie so great.
Works Cited
A Time to Kill. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Regency Enterprises, Warner Bros, 1996. DigitalCampus. Web. 20 September 2017