Mark Reviews Movies: ALWAYS IN SEASON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 26, 2019

The power of Always in Season, which examines three cases of lynching, is that it isn't a history lesson. Beyond the horror of these cases, the point of Jacqueline Olive's documentary is that this country has yet to legitimately confront the racism and racially motivated violence of its past, and because of that, racism and such violence are not things of the past. They continue, only disguised better and more quickly dismissed.

The focal point is the 2014 death of Lennon Lacy in Bladenboro, North Carolina. His body was discovered hanging from a swing set in a local park. While his death was ruled a suicide, the initial police investigation was laughably incompetent, since the station was closed for a long holiday weekend and the immediate assumption of suicide—despite the 17-year-old's private and public preparation for a football game the following day—was simply taken as a given.

This section of the film follows Lacy's mother Claudia and brother Pierre as they discuss their suspicions about the teenager's death and fight to open a more thorough investigation. For her part, Olive, with the help of family and friends and an attorney with the NAACP, looks into Lacy's life during the months leading up to his death.

By the end, there seems to be a clear-cut suspect (who, conveniently, left town days after Lacy's body was found). When the police didn't do the immediate legwork and the editor of the local newspaper doesn't care, is a proper investigation even possible?

Olive frames this possible murder as yet another in a long list of lynchings since the Reconstruction era. The major focus is on two: Claude Neal, a black man who was gruesomely tortured and killed after being accused of rape in 1934, and four people, who were shot repeatedly for no reason except the color of their skin in 1946 in Monroe, Georgia. An invitation to the former was published in the local newspaper, and a montage of headlines through the decades details lynchings being executed for such "infractions" as a black man greeting a white person.

The murders in Monroe, meanwhile, are re-created every year, and Olive documents the preparation for one staging. The central question on everyone's mind, of course, is whether or not such annual reminders are necessary. Always in Season, though scattered in its approach, serves as an answer in the affirmative.

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