If you want evidence that Jamie Foxx has come out on the other side of his health scare as talented as ever, just watch his performance in The Burial, which began streaming on Amazon Prime today.
Directed by Maggie Betts, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Doug Wright based on a New Yorker article, The Burial stars Foxx as the real-life personal injury lawyer Willie E. Gary, who was thrust into the legal limelight after winning an astonishing $500 million payout for his client in a 1995 lawsuit. As Gary, Foxx is magnetic. He preaches to the jury in the same way he preaches to his congregation, able to rouse emotions with the timber of his voice and the sway of his hands.
And yes, The Burial is based on real-life events. But just because The Burial is based on a true story doesn’t mean everything you see on screen actually happened. Read on to find out more about The Burial true story, how accurate The Burial movie is, and where Willie E. Gary is now.
Yes, The Burial is based on the true story of an American lawyer named Willie E. Gary (played by Jamie Foxx) and his client, Jeremiah Joseph O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones). In 1995, O’Keefe was a struggling funeral home owner in Florida, who sued a funeral company, the Loewen funeral company, over a breach of contract. Gary, who was then known as a successful personal injury lawyer, won the case for his client, and O’Keefe was awarded $500 million in punitive damages. (Later appealed down to $129 million.) Read on to learn more.
Like most movies based on a true story, several facts in this story got the “Hollywood treatment,” meaning they were changed, exaggerated, or eliminated for the sake of telling an entertaining story. Because the script for The Burial was adapted from the 1999 New Yorker article of the same name by Jonathan Harr, all you need to do is check out Harr’s original article in order to find out what was changed. (You can view the complete New Yorker digital archives with a subscription, or with a New York Public Library card.) You can also check out my summary of the changes below.
Harr’s article opens with Gary’s anecdote about being denied an apartment because of the color of his skin. Gary recounts this story to Tommy Lee Jones about halfway through the film, but some details were changed. In the movie, Gary says he was told there were plenty of vacancies on the phone, but told none were available when he showed up in person. According to Harr’s article, it’s actually much worse: Gary had already been promised the apartment, and even had a receipt for the deposit he sent, but was still told that the apartment was unavailable. In the movie version, Gary says he did not move into the building, but came back after he was a licensed lawyer and sued the realtor company. In reality, Gary—fresh out of law school—threatened, convincingly, that he would sue for racial discrimination. Suddenly, the apartment magically became available again, and Gary’s family was one of first Black families to move in to the building.
It seems the screenwriters changed the details of that particular story in order to give Gary a clear motivation for becoming a lawyer. According to Harr’s profile of Gary, he became a lawyer out of a more general sense of ambition and class-climbing, rather than being motivated by one particular instance. As is seen in the movie, Gary grew up dirt poor, as the son of a sharecropper. Through incredible persistence, he worked his way through school, started his own landscaping business, went to law school, passed the bar exam, and, eventually, started his own law firm.
Gary specialized in personal injury lawsuits and had a reputation for his ability to sway a jury to sympathize with his clients. In the movie, Gary says that he never represented any white clients before Jeremiah O’Keefe. However, according to Harr’s article, even before O’Keefe, Gary “had more white clients than black.” But obviously, having the fictional version of O’Keefe be the first white client of the fictional Gary helped sharpen the racial tension in the movie.
That said, some of the racial elements of the story were actually toned down for the movie. The real Mike Allred—O’Keefe’s longtime white lawyer, played by Alan Ruck in the movie—was, in real life, a self-proclaimed racist. According to Harr’s reporting, the real Allred announced to Gary, unprompted, that he was prejudiced against black men, but “working on it.” (In the movie, Foxx’s character asks Allred how he feels about working with a Black man, before Allred admits to his bigotry.) The Black lawyer on O’Keefe’s team who sought out help from Gary—Hal Dockins, played by Mamoudou Athie in the movie—reportedly could not stand Allred. And he wasn’t the only one—Allred reportedly wasn’t very well-liked by anyone. However, it appears the Allred character in the movie is a combination of the real Allred and another white lawyer on O’Keefe’s team named Cavanaugh, who isn’t in the movie at all.
It’s also worth noting that the actual details of the contract dispute were changed in the movie, likely for simplicity’s sake. In the movie, Raymond Loewen (played by Bill Camp) makes a verbal promise to O’Keefe to “no longer sell burial insurance in Southern Mississippi.” In exchange, the movie O’Keefe sells Loewen three of his funeral homes. It’s a simple, clean exchange, that’s easy for the audience to understand. In reality, however, there was actually a third party involved in a more complicated case. The real Loewen bought up the funeral home owned by a man named Robert Riemann, who previously had a contract with O’Keefe to be the exclusive seller of burial insurance for that particular funeral. But when Loewen bought the place, he refused to honor that contract, even after signing an agreement with O’Keefe. Or at least, that’s what O’Keefe’s lawyers said. Loewen’s lawyers argued that the contract language wasn’t so clear. But in the end, the details of that contract didn’t matter. Because Gary was able to paint Loewen as a villain, and that’s all that mattered.
Finally, the biggest change from the real story to the movie is that Jurnee Smollett’s character, Mame Downes, was invented for the film. Her character replaces a real-life lawyer, Richard Sinkfield, hired by Loewen after Gary came on board. Though Sinkfield was Black, he was not a woman. He also was not nearly the formidable “python” opponent that Smollett was in the movie. But hey, giving Gary a sexy femme fatale foil did make for a more entertaining story, right?
Today, Gary is 76 years old and still practicing law in Florida, under his firm Gary, Williams, Parenti, Watson & Gary, P.L.L.C., which consists of 37 attorneys, a team of paralegals, and a professional staff of over 100, according to reporting by Gary’s alma matter, Shaw University’s University News. The firm operates from three different offices in the cities of Stuart and Ft. Pierce in Florida. He also works as a motivational speaker, and, along with his wife Gloria and his oldest son Kenneth, runs the non-profit The Gary Foundation, which provides scholarships and other guidance to young scholars.