Betts focuses her lens on Foxx’s character, Willie E. Gary, a self-made success in personal injury law, who has never lost a case and doesn’t plan to. Jeremiah’s case is a contract one but a young associate played by the always appealing Mamoudou Athie convinces him that he’s going to need a lead counsel who is Black if they’re going to have a chance. The trial has been set for a poor, largely Black area, and Jeremiah’s longtime lawyer, Mike Allred (Alan Ruck, playing a character who would probably be a Con-Head), is an obvious racist. He’s working on it, he says chillingly to a team of Black lawyers.
When Willie does finally agree to go out of his comfort zone and take on a different kind of case (his ego stoked by the promise that this could make him as famous as Johnnie Cochran), there is a steep and humbling learning curve and a formidable opponent in Jurnee Smollett’s Ivy League-educated lawyer representing the Loewen Group.
Betts shares a screenwriting credit with Doug Wright, the Pulitzer and Tony-winning playwright, who has been with the project for years, with Alexander Payne once attached to direct. Betts was coming off a promising, but small, debut — the religious drama Novitiate, with Margaret Qualley and Melissa Leo. The Burial too is assured and straightforward, and faces questions about race and privilege and inequality head on. This story is about two older white men fighting about a contract, sure, but Betts and Wright expand its scope with sensitivity and nuance. Like many good courtroom dramas before it, this case is bigger than just these two guys.
