On a Mission of Dignity

Chains.

Cold. Unbreakable. Inescapable. Unforgiving.

The chains that bind the two main characters in the opening scenes of HBO’s “A Lesson Before Dying,” a searingly emotional drama set in a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, are invisible.

As the film opens, Grant Wiggins, a teacher, and a young plantation worker known only as Jefferson, are free men. There are no visible bonds restricting their movements.

But, as becomes painfully clear during the course of the film, which premieres Saturday night, both men are trapped by the torturous and inhumane legacy of slavery, even though they have learned to survive and adapt in the aftermath of what has been referred to as the biggest stain on American history.

More significant, it is the chains of their own self-inflicted fears and limitations that have imprisoned their spirits.

Polar opposites in many respects, Wiggins and Jefferson unwittingly hold the keys that can free each other from their respective tragic destinies. In the film, Wiggins reluctantly takes on the task of rebuilding the soul and self-worth of Jefferson, who is on death row for a crime he did not commit. But the prisoner also winds up taking the figurative chains off the free man.

The struggle of the two men to live and die with dignity is at the center of “A Lesson Before Dying,” the pay-cable network’s latest venture into adapting literature involving African Americans. The best-selling 1993 novel by Ernest J. Gaines, from which the film was adapted, won a National Book Critics award and was also a selection for Oprah Winfrey’s “book club.”

Colin Callender, president of HBO Original Movies, characterized the film, whose screenplay was by Ann Peacock, as the story of a man “caught between the consequences of the past and his aspirations for the future. He has to be able to reconcile those two pulls to find out who he is. There’s a real tug of war of the heart at the center of this.”

It’s a theme that touched and affected most of the cast and principals of the film, who maintained that they identified--sometimes all too much--with the heartbreaking journey to manhood.

“I have often asked myself this question, what it takes to be a man,” said Don Cheadle, who plays Wiggins. “I’ve never been in a situation close to this, but the scope of the question was somewhat unfathomable to me. What does it mean to make someone a man? What is the responsibility to family and community, as opposed to yourself? Do you have to lose yourself to find yourself? I have daughters. How do you go about influencing a good human being?”

Irma P. Hall, who plays Miss Emma, the godmother of Jefferson and the character who puts the story in motion, said she knew even before filming started that the project was likely to be an emotional and painful one. “I just thought, ‘Oh, boy, I’m going to be hurting in this one,’ ” Hall recalled with a chuckle.

Also starring in the drama is Cicely Tyson, who plays Tante Lou, a friend of Miss Emma who orders Wiggins, her younger relative, to take on the unenviable task of rehabilitating Jefferson (Mekhi Phifer). The film is directed by Joseph Sargent, who also directed HBO’s Emmy-winning “Miss Evers’ Boys.”

The project is also premiering at a time when the disturbing high school shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., and other destructive acts by young people have put a spotlight on the question of one’s humanity and whether a belief in the dignity and value of life has been lost on much of the younger generation.

Said Cheadle: “Young people see all the time on television that life is portrayed as being cheap and unimportant. They’re fed a steady diet of that kind of thing, and some of them argue that life isn’t valuable. I hope that this film can transcend just being entertainment and that it could cause some young people to think about the sanctity of life.”

*

The story grew out of Gaines’ fascination with executions at San Quentin, across the bay from San Francisco, where he spent much of his life.

“There’s nothing more terrifying for a man than knowing that he’s going to die right at 10 p.m. on a very specific day,” Gaines said. “That whole idea has just haunted me and haunted me. I tried to write about it before in the 1980s, but I got no cooperation from the warden. Then a friend of mine gave me some information about a case in the South in the 1940s about a black man involved in the killing of a white person, and I decided to go in that direction.”

Gaines wanted the two main characters to tackle the dilemma of what constitutes a whole life and what it means to become a man.

“I was trying to show two men who had not really lived their lives,” Gaines said. “Jefferson had not lived because of the environment he was in, and now he was going to die. Grant Wiggins had wanted to escape his environment. He is very limited because of being a black man in the South. Grant can’t become a lawyer or a businessman or a doctor. He winds up almost choking to death. One’s a condemned man and the other is just running in place.

“Grant must help Jefferson in the last few months of his life, but Jefferson must help Grant as well. Grant needs Jefferson in order to live.”

In the first scenes of “A Lesson Before Dying,” the good-hearted but uneducated Jefferson winds up as the only witness in a robbery and murder at a rural Louisiana liquor store when a white man is killed. Jefferson is linked to the crime and arrested on charges of murder and robbery.

Trying to save his client from the electric chair, Jefferson’s defense attorney in his closing argument strips away every shred of humanity; the underpinning of the argument is that his client is not a man but a “hog,” a dumb animal, not even worth killing. Jefferson sits by silently, absorbing the words like body blows.

In the end, the attorney loses his case and Jefferson his dignity. It is a pronouncement that sears the heart of Miss Emma, who has done the best she could to raise her godson. The movie unfolds around her unrelenting efforts to ensure that Jefferson reclaims his dignity before he goes to his death.

A reluctant Wiggins becomes Miss Emma’s answer--an educated man whose jailhouse conversations with Jefferson will attempt to reconnect him to life. The task is made harder since Wiggins is fighting his own sense of worthlessness, having tried, and failed, to escape the South.

But as the two men spend more time together in the stifling confines of Jefferson’s cell, each begins to see and understand the other’s frustrations.

*

The cast had no problems getting in touch with the feeling of being trapped and imprisoned. Much of the film was shot on the 1,000-acre Laurel Valley Plantation in New Orleans. The property has cabins that had been inhabited by slaves and former slaves long after the transition from slavery to plantation work.

The look of the film is lush--trees graced with Spanish moss and rich greenery borne of the heat and humidity of the South. But against that landscape is the stifling dustiness of the fields where the blacks work. The wide-open spaces also provide a contrast to the closet-like feel of Jefferson’s cell.

Cheadle, who has become a staple at HBO with his starring performances in the films “The Rat Pack” and “Rebound: The Legend of Earl ‘The Goat’ Manigault,” said that although he enjoyed working with cast members and director Sargent, the project was a challenging one, particularly given the surroundings.

“It was really like there were ghosts all around us, and that was eerie,” he said. “It was horrible to project what the real situation must have been like. It was tough knowing these things happen. Plus it was particularly challenging pulling off a script that was so emotionally dense. At times it was very claustrophobic for Mekhi and me.”

Sargent held extensive rehearsals with his cast to try to get to the heart of the agony each of the characters was experiencing: “We really had to dig in, and not take the surface value of anything. The subtleties were many.”

One particularly difficult scene to film was a sequence in which Wiggins and Miss Emma visit Jefferson in his cell for the first time. Still burning with contempt for himself and the world that has labeled him a “hog,” Jefferson refuses to even look at Miss Emma, turning away from the food she had so carefully cooked for him. It breaks her heart.

“That whole scene tore Irma apart, and it tore me apart,” Sargent said. “We kept asking ourselves, ‘Are we overdoing the emotion in this?’ It was a very tricky scene, and we weren’t quite sure whether we were pushing much too hard. Why would Jefferson just not respond to Miss Emma, who had done everything for him?

“But ultimately we worked it out and discovered that the tone was right. Jefferson is just so devastated and damaged by those early years of neglect [before Miss Emma took charge] that he’s just turned inward. He just felt that nobody cared about him, and so he no longer cared about himself.”

The story is told with emotion but also restraint. That balance was critical to Sargent, Cheadle and the other cast members, who did not want the message to be lost to sentimentality. Cheadle said he was also grateful for a scene that showed Wiggins and Jefferson sharing a laugh. “They had to show us happy at one point, otherwise the scenes [in which] we have to come down wouldn’t mean anything,” he said.

Hall, who had appeared with Phifer in the 1997 feature film “Soul Food,” said she had read “A Lesson Before Dying” a while ago; although, she said, she thought it was a “beautiful story, filled with poetry, I never imagined that it could be turned into a movie.”

She compared the novel to “Beloved,” Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a woman so traumatized by the effects of slavery that she sacrifices her daughter, which Winfrey turned into a film last year.

“Like ‘Beloved,’ this is so deep,” Hall said. “It made me cry. I could just feel all these people yearning, and I felt so sorry for Jefferson.”

Ultimately, the lesson in “A Lesson Before Dying” is one of redemption, of reaching an individual peace no matter how dire the circumstances or how high the cost.

“It’s definitely not a walk in the park,” Cheadle said of the film.

*

Sargent has high hopes for “A Lesson Before Dying” that it will illuminate the struggles that exist for men and women. But he also wonders if the film can reach an audience on a higher level, particularly in the wake of recent headlines.

“I would like to think that movies like this and ‘Miss Evers’ Boys’ can reach young people whose minds are just beginning to develop and change,” he said. “In many ways, I feel like I’m sometimes preaching to the choir. Are we really reaching the kids that need to be reached, who need to see stories like this, or are we just talking to ourselves? I want to reach them before the goon squad gets them, before the culture of violence gets to their minds.

“Whether we can do that a little bit with ‘A Lesson Before Dying’ remains to be seen. I hope it adds at least a little grain of sand to the balance. I have hope.”

*

“A Lesson Before Dying” premieres Saturday at 9:30 p.m. and will air several times during the next few weeks.

Greg Braxton is a Times staff writer who covers television.