Jamie Foxx deploys his movie star charm judiciously and skillfully as a litigator with swagger to spare in The Burial, a very entertaining courtroom drama.
Foxx is one of those actors, blessed with an allure and glamour that runs so deep that it’s almost tempting to dismiss a performance like this as one that’s natural. It’s one of those compliments that’s rotten at its core — of course he, or Clooney, or whomever, is good at being slick and appealing, right? If it looks effortless, we assume it is, denying them the work that goes into every role.
The same could be said for The Burial, which is glossy, appealing and goes down suspiciously easy. Is there a catch or did director and co-writer Maggie Betts just prove her commercial chops in her sophomore feature? (It’s the latter.) Just take a look at the poster used for its marketing campaign — a little retro, a little cheesy, and a lot self-aware. This movie and everyone involved knows what it is.
In a probably skewed memory of the mid-’90s, these sort of mid-budget “rousing courtroom dramas” seemed ubiquitous, but have gone the way of the rom-com, at least in big theatrical releases. The Burial will be in some theaters for a week, before coming to your living room on Oct. 13 on Prime Video.
This story is a classic David vs. Goliath one, in which a Biloxi funeral home owner, Tommy Lee Jones as Jeremiah O’Keefe, goes up against a billionaire, Raymond Loewen (Bill Camp). Both were children of funeral parlor owners, but O’Keefe stayed local while Loewen took the so-called “death care” business corporate. He made a fortune acquiring funeral homes in Canada and then the United States in anticipation of a “golden age of death,” in which the baby boomers start meeting their ends in mass numbers. The Burial is loosely based on a true story, which was chronicled by Jonathan Harr in The New Yorker in 1999.
