I was expecting a biopic of Thurgood Marshall, civil rights attorney extraordinaire, and the prime mover of the civil rights movement in America. Instead, we get a rather pedestrian courtroom drama, in which Chadwick Boseman's Marshall is more of a mentor to the true protagonist, Sam Freidman, played by Josh Gad. This doesn't cover any of Marshall's landmark civil rights struggles or the many cases he argued before the Supreme Court, much less his own appointment to that body. The film is set more than 25 years before, shortly after Marshall's first such case, alluded to in a conversation, but having little bearing on the film. In Connecticut, a black chauffeur is charged with the rape of his employer's wife, largely on her own testimony. The NAACP sends Marshall, their only attorney, to take the case, and avert the PR disaster a guilty verdict would be for the black community. Needing the cover of a member of the Connecticut bar, the local NAACP member hires an old schoolmate, Freidman, an insurance claim litigator, whose specialty is utilizing loopholes in laws and contracts to mitigate his clients' responsibility, against his own wishes. It is Freidman who actually has an arc in the film, dragged kicking and screaming inspired by Marshall to evolve from concerned primarily with his own standing within the community and the damage his reputation would incur from defending a black-on-white rapist, to marginally competent trial partner (whose arguments & questions are all pre-written by Marshall), who will, in real life, after the movie, become a civil rights crusader. For Connecticut.

Now, as a courtroom drama, this is a reasonable movie, with the surprise reveal of the truth pretty well-telegraphed in advance. There are decent performances from Boseman and Gad, and especially James Cromwell as a hostile judge who might be capable of a modicum of integrity and even shame. The prosecutor is a sneering elitist privileged cardboard cutout, which is sort of a weird way to play that, considering the aforementioned twist.

The problem, is that Thurgood Marshall did so much more significant stuff. They point all this out in the subtitles at the end, namely that Marshall won nearly thirty cases before the Supreme Court, including more or less the most important civil race case of all, "Brown vs. the Board of Education", before eventually being appointed to the high court himself. And then it issues what is plainly supposed to be the crown of his trophy case: a compliment from Martin Luther King Jr. Fuck that shit. That's like saying the greatest achievement of Luke Skywalker & Han Solo is winning the respect of C-3PO. MLK was posturing demagogue who turned up for the victory lap after Marshall & men like him turned the tide and is best known for a plagiarized speech and a march against a lame duck political establishment, in support of a cause that was already won, on behalf of a population that begged him not to. As far as the exchange of compliments goes, Marshall's opinion of King was somewhat less than flattering, comparing him to an immature tyro jogging the grownups' elbows.

Another rather obnoxious aspect of the film is that, because it is made by 21st century Hollywood, diverts attention at times from the injustices perpetuated against blacks with references to the Holocaust and the domestic travails of wealthy white women. Holocaust allusions in a movie about the American civil rights movement are insulting to America and distracting from the ostensible topic, but in this case, due to the context, only support my contention that Freidman is the REAL protagonist. Also the problems of women running into the white male power structure are rather puerile when the subject of such a narrative is abusing feminine prerogatives to take the path of least resistance at the expense of a person with many fewer options, who will be hurt worse.

OTOH, it might be something of a statement of what exactly the situation is for blacks, that they have to resort to playing the sympathy card for the rich blonde to achieve their ends. YMMV, but I think they laid it on a little too thick and were a little too subtle about making that point.

Anyway, this trial has incredibly low stakes compared to what we know blacks were going through in other places, despite clumsy attempts to tack on really horrible stuff in Marshall's personal life and patch up that whole "he's not actually the main character" hole, and name-drop contemporary black figures. Having a character say "Oh, hey, look everyone! It's Zora Neale Hurston!" and have Hurston not actually do or contribute anything of substance to the film. Ironically, it seems to play up one of the more egregious tropes of racial awkwardness. It turns out all the historically famous black people from the early 1940s DID, in fact, know each other. But back to the stakes, at a time when completely innocent black people could get in much worse trouble without doing anything to bring it upon themselves, a low-life black guy who is only technically maybe not guilty of one specific thing, who at best did something really stupid and immoral he absolutely knew could have adverse and horrific consequences, is a somewhat less compelling victim than one might expect to find in a dramatization of Thurgood Marshall's work. This story would be better suited to a one-off case of the week on a single episode of a prestige drama about Marshall's career, rather than a whole movie.

So many civil rights movies the last few years have been outright revisionist propaganda (The Butler; Detroit; Roots remake) or sadly falling short of what they could have been (Race; 42), and I really had higher hopes for "Marshall." It's not a BAD movie, it's just not much of a civil rights piece.