Jamie Foxx’s  Dazzling Performance Makes The Burial Amazon’s USP  This Year

The Burial(Prime Video)

Rating: *** ½

Jamie Foxx’s  is  so soooo brilliant a  flamboyant lawyer Willie E Gary  in this  engrossing legal drama that you would be  tempted  to overlook the  subdued impact  of  the  film’s other lead the underrated Tommy Lee Jones  who  plays the funeral entrepreneur Jeremiah O’Keefe who hires Gary to get him out of a bogus  contract with a business shark.

 More than an involving  The Burial directed  by  Maggie Betts(do catch her Novitiate)  is  actually more a comment on troubled tenebrous racial relations  in America where apparently, all  men are  born  equal but some of a particular colour are more equal than others.

 No matter how  much we talk of progress  and  change in civilization, the  power hierarchy remains in many ways, where  it was  60-70  years ago. The  film’s agonizing depiction of race relations takes  the form of a very dark probing but humorous  and non-toxic  exploration  of the legal system in  the US.

Foxx’s flamboyant  attorney act is  a dead giveaway  for  an Oscar nomination. But the rest  of the cast is no less impressive. The screenplay affords a  wide variety  of interesting characters  consumed by their own definition of  greed and its  many variations.The actors go a  long way in making the David-Goliath battle  an irresistible experience for the audience.

The  battle lines are  very clearly drawn . There is no  attempt to bring in ambiguous fillers in the plot.The  Good Guys versus  Bad Guys alignment makes  the  conflict a very elementary morality tale. And yet there are unexpected pockets of  profound exploration of  ethics and morality which  crop up in waves of humorous banter between the  lawyers of both the parties.

While Jurnee Smollett  does a swell job of a thankless role as  the  Bad Guy’s  attorney-in-chief, Alan Ruck as a racially conflicted white lawyer and  Mamoudou Athie as a very young  black lawyer  trying to make his  way  through  various levels of prejudice ,  are unconditionally  exemplary.

The  Burial  holds no surprises. The  conclusion to this morality tale is  foregone. This doesn’t prevent our  complete investment in this film about crooked investments.