BY ANY MEANS, based on actual events, asks difficult questions and provides even more difficult answers. Set in the Mississippi of 1966, it reveals the quasi-confirmed revelations about Klan murders of civil rights activists that were investigated not by the FBI, but rather by a Mafia hitman who was brought in to get information that the FBI couldn’t using legal means. The film, of course, takes liberties with its narrative, but the events and the atmosphere of that place and time is captured with a chilling immediacy such that when a good old boy’s dog is shot after he murders a successful black man for being a successful black man it is awful, but awful because of who that good old boy is. Especially when we see how that racist mourns a dog while metaphorically spitting on the grave of the black man. These were the times when a dog, precious as those creatures are, was worth more to this racist than the life of a human being.
It starts with newsreel footage in black & white of Bull Connor and his firehoses and police dogs and the murder of Freedom Riders Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner before switching to the startling red of newly spilled blood. A man is tied to a chair. Another wields a baseball bat. In keeping with the questions this film wants us to confront, the victim knows where the Freedom Riders’ bodies have been hidden. The man with the bat, Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), is the one beating it out of him. It is brutal and meant to be seen that way as a touchstone of exactly what was happening during and after Freedom Summer of 1964, and the challenging ethics that we are about to see.
Jump to 1966 and Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is one of the rare black FBI agents working anywhere, but even rarer in his new posting in Mississippi. It’s his home state, but years in Chicago have given him a new perspective and a new wife, Allison (Nicole Beharie) who followed him there knowing intellectually, but not emotionally what she was going to face. That reckoning arrives quickly when Stridyer’s old friend, a well-to-do businessman, Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito), is firebombed in his home for trying to get out the black vote, and Strider is assigned to the case. Unofficially. His job is to be the handler for Scarp, to meet him at his motel after he arrives from Brooklyn, give him a briefcase, and then follow his lead to find out the perpetrators.
Yes, it’s an odd couple scenario with Strider a straightlaced agent who goes by the book and Scarpa a golden goombah of a Mafioso with no legal restraints, a chatty, even personable attitude, and whose only moral code is getting the job done. Things come to a head when they are stopped on a deserted stretch of highway by a state trooper looking to have some fun at Strider’s expense. What transpires opens Strider’s eyes to exactly what his assignment involves, and starts the conversation between them about who has the workable plan for a better world: Dr. King or Malcolm X. And, yes, those are the names invoked and by the title of the film you can guess where it lands.
It doesn’t stint on what made the racists so invested in their cause, and their absolute certainty that they were doing God’s work. Bible verses are cited as crosses burn and murders are planned. The results of that conviction are everywhere. A Whites Only sign decorates the door of a toy shop (named Sambo). A white policeman looks at Strider’s badge and tells him he doesn’t see anything before telling him to get on his way with a demeaning epithet. When Scarpa tells Strider to accompany him into a gun shop, something verboten for a black man, the look on Strider’s face says more than his dialogue, and the way they are greeted by the owner is a precis on the unspoken rules the pair are violating. So is the rifle pulled on them after Strider shows his badge.
What makes his film work beyond the bracing reminder of how far we’ve come is the chemistry between Abdul-Mateen and Wahlberg. The tentative rapport as Strider watches Scarpa’s methods and finds fewer and fewer reasons to object to them. Abdul-Mateen makes us understand the ethical struggle Strider is going through when faced with pure evil that believes it is on the right side of history. We, too, struggle, but the closed ranks of the Klan that control everything, including the local police presents an implacable obstacle that allows for no other reaction given the circumstances. It helps that Walhberg is both personable and dangerous as Scarpa brooks no nonsense before getting down to violent business without the weight of qualms or conscience. Fortunately, we are given a glimpse into his home life, which does nothing to dispel the violence he uses as a tool and passes down to his son, but also shows a family man devoted to wife and kids, even if he cheats on the former as soon as he touches down in Mississippi.
BY ANY MEANS is as vicious as the people and events it portrays, and any depiction of that time needs to be if it wants to be honest. Beyond the history lesson, it poses those ci-mentioned questions as it contemplates the meaning of justice and the price of humanity.
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