This is a kind of made for cable TV film that I can imagine was trailed every 15 minutes in the run up to its first showing. The shocking true story of the murder of James Byrd jr in 1998 when he was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged through the roads in Jasper, East Texas. Byrd was black and his murderers were three white men.Obviously this was a horrific crime, the drama is interspersed with news footage of politicians commenting on this even including President Bill Clinton.Jon Voight plays the considerate and wily Sheriff Billy Rowles who investigates the crime and finds the assailants rather quickly. Louis Gossett jr is the town mayor.However we get to know little about the victim. Its rather hinted from early scenes that he had been a bad boy in the past and in other scenes it was alleged that he was a drug dealer. We also do not find out why the young guys decided to commit such a crime.We see footage of the drag scenes in flashback, obviously the filmmakers decide to tread the line by not being too exploitative but there are some graphic scenes of the aftermath.The film turns to the examination of how the events caused waves to the town, where racism was hidden and the events brought the media as well as the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan into the town and turn it into a powder keg. We also have the case reaching the court as the men stand trial.Yet this part of the story is rather uninteresting and perfunctory. Its very much highlights the flaws of these type of made for cable TV films. A shocking true event turned into a true movie of the week in a sanitized way. The budget is blown in getting the services of two Oscar winning actors but the production is sub par with lacklustre cinematography.

Texas is a big, big state. There is plenty of room for racism to exist in any places at once. In 1998, there were two big incidents that made national headlines.Near the Louisiana border, in Jasper, Texas. James Byrd was being drug to his death by three white men out for a good time. 600 miles away, near the New Mexico border, in Tulia, Texas, the sheriff hired Tome Coleman to combat his town's perceived drug problem. As the trials went on in Jasper, a pre-dawn raid rounded up 46 black men in Tulia and they were sentenced to 750 years in prison on trumped-up charges.We will have to wait until Halle Berry has her baby to see the completion of Tulia, but we can watch the crimes in Jasper, now.Louis Gossett Jr. plays the Mayor of Jasper, and Jon Voight is the Sheriff. They have to deal with the impact of the crime and the trial on a town of 8,000. They are not only ill prepared to investigate such a heinous murder, but they have to deal with the Black Panthers, who arrive to march armed (legal in Texas), and the KKK. I cannot think of two actors who were better suited for the parts, and could have played them better.The overall message of the film is that these three men were not representative of the town - that blacks and whites got along. The truth was laid bare during the trial. They got along because the black citizens did not make waves. There was an undercurrent of racism throughout the community and it took an incident like this to get the town to look at it.It is a shame that it took a death to make things better, but James Byrd did have what is hopefully a lasting legacy on the town.

What a horrible incident! I don't agree with my state's (over)use of the death penalty, but somehow, I'm just fine with the fact that the perpetrators of this crime are going to get the death juice in a few years. The movie portrayal of the incident is sensitive and well-done. Louis Gossett, Jr. is awesome in this movie, which is an added bonus. I had an opportunity to be in the same room as R.C. Horn (long story), and he's almost a dead-ringer for Louis Gossett, Jr. Anyway, a great movie about a horrible incident.

Anyone looking for a typical true-crime drama with suspenseful courtroom scenes -- the kind of thing that premium TV channels do fairly effectively -- won't find it here. This is a low-key, sometimes leisurely look at racial relationships in a small Texas town in 1998.The crime, which was true enough, is utterly horrifying: a black man dragged for no reason for miles behind a speeding pick-up truck by three young white men.So the movie is not a mystery. It's not a courtroom drama either. The scenes in court are rather quickly done. Instead we have John Voight as the slow-moving thoughtful county sheriff and Lou Gossett, Jr., as the nervous mayor of Jasper. The film deals with how the crime brings to the surface of this ostensibly placid little community the racial tensions that exist in its emotional infrastructure. The tensions are symbolized by a broken-down weed-covered wire fence that segregates the cemetery into black and white areas."We've got good folk here," says Gossett, looking out his office window. And indeed the police chief is white and the mayor and many members of the city council black, and law enforcement is thoroughly desegregated, and everyone is polite and friendly to one another. But the murder confuses everyone, mixes things up in an unpleasant way, generates ideas that make people uncomfortable, prompts them to say things and to behave in ways that they otherwise would not have done. But everything is okay in Jasper, Texas, say the residents, while Byrd, the victim, is being buried in the black section of the cemetery. Frantic journalists come and the black panthers descend upon the town, fully armed, followed by the KKK. After all this has gone down, the town council, the mayor, the sheriff, and their families are having dinner al fresco with candles guttering in the breeze. Everyone is puzzled about what is going on. And in an attempt at reasoned discourse, both the blacks and the white people reveal prejudices that had no one seems to have been aware of, either in themselves or the other parties, or at any rate had never acknowledged. The dinner scene ends with Voight and Gossett sitting across the table from each other -- neither of them angry, both of them bemused and sad.You can see through the rusty wire fence, half hidden by vines, but it's still there. No easy answers are offered. None are possible. It isn't simply a white problem. It's a problem for blacks too, a population in which what was once a defensive solidarity has come to take on a function of its own. And it's a problem over much of the world. Take a look at Rwanda ten years ago. Or the "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia. This is one tough nut to crack, as the movie acknowledges, although there is no question but that this outbreak was "started" by a couple of renegade Aryan supremacists. Does the movie end happily? Surprisingly -- for a Hallmark Production -- the answer is a firm "yes and no." The wire fence is torn down, the murderer convicted and sentenced to death. (The first time a white man has been condemned for killing a black man in Texas since 1854 in a case which was a dispute over who the slave belonged to.) Yet, at the end, Gossett has lost his pension and is out of office.There's craftsmanship evident in this film. The writing isn't bad. Neither are the performances. One scene is particularly poignant. During the trial we have seen the father of the murderer seated in court, a stereotypical redneck cracker peckerwood with a creased mean-looking face, in a wheelchair with cannulae in his nose, his expression a sort of fixed glower. The victim's father is in court too. An overweight sodden-seeming black man with very dark skin and a sad face. When the trial is over, the son sentenced, and everyone has left the court except these two men, the old white guy wheels himself over and pauses in front of the black guy. We expect a confrontation, but we don't get it. The father of the white murderer apologizes abjectly and clumsily to the father of the black victim, saying, "I don't know how I could of raised a boy like that." The old black man grasps his arm lightly and replies, "It ain't your fault. We're just two people who lost our boys." It's a touching moment.The director seems to need more seasoning. There are violent inserts, several seconds each, of the victim being dragged behind the truck, screaming, the screen red and black. It's as if someone had thought to throw them in because the story needed juicing up. But the scenes are more distracting than shocking; they interrupt the flow of what is a fairly good film. And the lighting needed more thought than it was given. Why should a courtroom be so poorly lighted that we can barely make out the faces of the spectators, even in close up? The score fits the rest of the film, and the location shooting, which I take to be Canadian, is unevocative. These problems aside, this is a rather intelligent treatment of a fairly complicated problem, pinned down as America's Great Social Divide by Gunnar Myrdal and others long ago. We can always end a war, one way or another, but pulling down that wire fence is a much more difficult job.