The Brilliant True Story Behind Jamie Foxx's 'The Burial' Is Insanely Satisfying

By Dustin Rowles | Film | September 7, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | September 7, 2023 |

The trailer for The Burial was released this week. The film premieres at the Toronto Film Festival this weekend before hitting theaters on October 6th and Prime Video on October 13th. It stars Jamie Foxx as a brash attorney Willie Gary, Tommy Lee Jones as his client, Jerry O’Keefe, and Jurnee Smollett as the vicious opposing counsel.

Here’s the trailer, but stick around after to read about the true story upon which the film is based because it’s a doozy.

I love a good courtroom drama, and I miss the days when there’d be a John Grisham adaptation starring an A-lister in theaters every year or so (Denzel! Matt Damon! Tom Cruise! Julia Roberts! Matthew McConaughey! Sandra Bullock!), or a movie like A Few Good Men, which would make a huge Oscar run. I also loved both the movie A Civil Action, and the book upon which it was based from journalist Jonathan Harr.

The Burial is actually adapted from a New Yorker piece by Jonathan Harr. Willie Gary is something of a self-made guy. He came from poverty, started a landscaping business to put himself through school, and took on a murder trial during his first week in the Office of the Public Defender. Soon thereafter, he opened up his own firm, settled a case in his second year for $225,000, and before long had racked up over 60 settlements or victories worth over $1 million.

Enter Jeremiah O’Keefe, a Mississippi businessman who in the 1990s hired Willie Gary to sue a corporate funeral business over a contractual dispute. This is back when the funeral business was consolidating, and Ray Loewen (played by Bill Camp) was the head of a large chain of Canadian and American funeral homes. O’Keefe sued because he was pissed that the Loewen Group, a Canada-based corporation with more than 700 funeral homes and 109 cemeteries in the United States, had tried to run him out of business after O’Keefe had bought back the family mansion lost during the Depression and turned it into a funeral parlor. Basically, the Loewen Group used fraudulent practices “to monopolize regional funeral markets and raise prices to the bereaved.” Basically, the Loewen Group was the WalMart for funeral services: They offered cut-rate deals until they ran local businesses into bankruptcy and then they raised prices with their monopolies. The case itself, however, was more of a personal courtroom battle between O’Keefe and Ray Loewen.

As the trailer suggests, Willie Gary did ask the Loewen Group to settle for an outrageous $125 million. But here’s the fun part: The jury, which had 8 Black jurors on it who decidedly did not care for Loewen’s attempt to curry their favor, ruled in favor of O’Keefe for $500 million.

From the NYTimes:

“I had at least a dozen lawyers — not one of them flagged the danger of a Southern jury,” said Mr. Loewen, who had rebuffed an early offer of a settlement for a few million dollars. “But, to be fair, Willie Gary is a personality that is unique, and so I think our legal counsel was blindsided, too.” He added, “My counsel — they’re gentlemen, not street fighters.”

That remark brought a deep chuckle from Mr. Gary, who grew up in a Florida shack and scrapped his way up from water boy to football player at a small black college before becoming a successful civil trial lawyer based in Stuart, Fla.

“I fight within the rules,” Mr. Gary said, adding that Mr. Loewen had simply run into “somebody who didn’t care about his money and his power and stood toe to toe with him.”

Willie Gary and Jeremiah O’Keefe ultimately bankrupted the Loewen Group. The cherry on top? O’Keefe bought all of the Loewen Group’s assets in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana using the money he won in his suit against the Loewen Group.

I genuinely can’t wait to see what appears to be a huge crowd-pleaser.

Background: New York Times, The New Yorker