In late 1999, Northampton writer Jonathan Harr published a lengthy piece, “The Burial,” in The New Yorker, an account of a noteworthy 1995 trial in Mississippi in which a jury awarded a staggering $500 million to a small-scale funeral home owner for breach of contract.

The defendant in the case was a man named Ray Loewen, a Canadian businessman whose multimillion-dollar company had gobbled up hundreds of funeral homes in the U.S. and Canada, and who would see his empire crumble following the trial, as he was forced to declare bankruptcy.

Lending weight to the story, which drew national attention, was the work by the plaintiff’s colorful lawyer, Willie E. Gary, a Black man from Florida who’d grown up dirt poor but had become one of the most successful personal injury lawyers in the U.S. He was nicknamed “The Giant Killer” for taking down corporations, and he flew around the country on a private jet emblazoned with the words “Wings of Justice.”

It seemed a story tailor-made for film, something Harr had experience with. Just a year before his article appeared, his 1995 nonfiction book, “A Civil Action,” a bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner that covered another dramatic court case, had been turned into a major Hollywood film starring John Travolta.

“The Burial” has now made it to the screen as well — but this time it took almost 23 years for it to happen, with Harr’s article taking a long, winding journey through Hollywood limbo after it was initially optioned by Warner Brothers, not long after the original piece was published.

The film, by Amazon Studios, will have a limited theatrical release beginning Oct. 7 and then will move to Amazon Prime. Starring Jamie Foxx, Tommy Lee Jones and a number of other noted actors, “The Burial” earned several positive reviews after it recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival.

Variety, for one, calls the movie “a rousing old-school crowd-pleaser … featuring the most entertaining performance yet from Jamie Foxx, who makes a day in court feel like going to church.”

“This has a been a real bookend to my Hollywood experience,” Harr said during a recent phone call from his home. “With ‘A Civil Action,’ I got a [film] contract before the book even came out. This time, we tried for years to get it made, and I didn’t think it was ever going to happen.”

After Warner Brothers optioned his New Yorker article, names like Ron Howard were floated as potential directors for the film, and Warner Brothers renewed the option on his piece a few times, Harr notes.

But some years down the road, the project passed to Sony, then to Double Nickel, a small New York production company whose most well-known film might be Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino.” Along the way a script was commissioned by an acclaimed playwright, Doug Wright, but the project remained stuck, Harr said.

George Floyd’s murder in 2020, though, seemed to provide some fresh momentum, he noted, and then Amazon acquired the movie rights and made the film over the last few years.

Harr credits a number of people who kept pushing for it, such as film co-producer Jenette Khan at Double Nickel; Bobby Shriver, another co-producer and a friend who had originally tried to convince Harr to write a book about the 1995 trial; and Scott Foundas, a former movie critic who now works in film acquisition and development for Amazon.

“Scott took a risk in making the movie,” Harr said. “I really appreciate how he helped make this happen.”

Race, class, and gender

Good thing Foundas did, because Harr’s original story is a rich one. And though the film has made any number of changes from his article — a trailer says the movie “was inspired by true events,” and the film has dispensed with most of Gary’s up-from-his-bootstraps background — Harr says it works well.

“Overall it’s really well done, very funny, and Jamie Foxx is just outstanding,” Harr said. “Tommy Lee Jones is great, too, and Jurnee Smollett is brilliant.”

Foxx plays Willie Gary, Jones plays Jeremiah “Jerry” O’Keefe, the elderly Mississippi funeral home owner who sued Ray Loewen, and Smollett plays an invented character, Mame Downes, a cool, Ivy League Black attorney for Loewen who becomes a formidable opponent to Gary.

Race and class are a big part of the story. O’Keefe was a fifth-generation White businessman from Biloxi, Mississippi who ended up hiring a Black sharecropper’s son — Gary — to be his trial lawyer against a rich foreign corporation that O’Keefe said had tried to put him out of business through deceit and shady tactics.

In addition, the case was tried in front of a predominantly Black jury, and both Harr’s article and the film note that Gary played to that, sometimes invoking the rhythms and cadences of a preacher in his courtroom presentation. (The presiding judge, James Graves Jr., was also Black.)

Indeed, Gary cast the trial both as a David and Goliath battle and a struggle between good and evil — an honorable small businessman and decorated WWII fighter pilot up against a rapacious, steamrolling corporation — rather than focusing on the arcane details of a business deal gone sour.

Gary, Harr writes, “assembled the evidence of the previous two months into a story that appeared nearly seamless in its contours and particulars … The single weak link — the terms of the contract … and whether Loewen had actually violated those terms — he brushed effortlessly aside.”

Gary, then in his late 40s, emerges in the article as a buoyant, high-energy man who enjoys the trappings of his success, including a few gaudy touches such as wearing a diamond-encrusted Rolex watch. But he’s also someone who can command a courtroom through his plainspoken manner and sense of humor.

A trailer for “The Burial” highlights some of those characteristics, such as a scene in which Foxx, on the first day of the trial, approaches the jury members and says in a serious tone, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury” — then pauses, smiles, and adds “How y’all doin’ ?”

In another scene, he turns to a character named Mike Allred, a longtime White family lawyer for O’Keefe, and says “How do you feel about working with Black folk?”

“I suppose I am a little prejudiced,” says Allred, played by Alan Ruck.

“Did you meet my team?” Foxx responds, as five flinty-eyed Black men, all wearing impeccably tailored suits, unsmilingly introduce themselves.

“Gentlemen,” says Buck, with a nervous bob of his head.

Harr says that scene is another Hollywood invention — Gary had both Black and White attorneys on his staff, and he’s represented plenty of White clients in his career — but he’s also impressed with how “The Burial” director, Maggie Betts, has shaped and paced the movie. (Betts also co-wrote the final screenplay.)

“I understand the changes you have to make to bring print to the screen,” he said. “A movie is a completely different thing, and of course it can only be two hours long.”

A number of critics have singled out Betts for praise as well. Variety says her film offers “sharp observations on race, class and gender in respectful yet entertaining ways throughout.”

And despite scenes that have both Gary and Downes preaching in the courtroom in a manner few judges would likely allow, the magazine adds, “Betts orchestrates it in such a way that ... you want to clap your hands and shout ‘Amen!’”

And who knows? Harr says “The Burial” is getting just a short theatrical release, probably to qualify for the Academy Awards, and given that, “Jamie Foxx could get a nod for best actor.”

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.