Jamie Foxx wears a Rolex Yacht-Master II

The strangest fight in the 1995 trial behind The Burial was about a yacht. Willie Gary, the Florida lawyer representing a Mississippi funeral home owner named Jeremiah O'Keefe, kept pressing Raymond Loewen, the Canadian funeral magnate he was suing over a broken oral agreement, about the boat Loewen entertained on: what it cost, and whether he even owned it, since the Loewen Group rented it from another company Loewen controlled. The judge eventually told both sides to move on. The point had landed anyway. Gary wanted the jury to see a man out of touch with reality.

Maggie Betts gave that story to Jamie Foxx in 2023, and dressed him for it. The real Gary was one of eleven children, the son of a field worker, an all-state football player who reached Shaw University on an athletic scholarship, and he spent his verdicts loudly: three thousand dollar suits, a 25,000 square foot mansion, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, and a private jet named Wings of Justice, a Gulfstream II fitted with 18 karat gold fixtures and eventually traded up to a Boeing 737 wearing his scales-of-justice logo. The film compresses that biography into a wardrobe, and onto Foxx's wrist it straps a yellow gold Rolex Yacht-Master II, reference 116688: 44 millimeters on a gold bracelet, white dial, blue ceramic bezel, pushers on either side of the crown, and a regatta countdown for timing the start of yacht races, locked and unlocked by twisting the bezel.

The film, with Tommy Lee Jones as O'Keefe, follows the trial to its verdict: 100 million dollars in compensatory damages and 400 million punitive, half a billion against the funeral conglomerate, the largest verdict Mississippi had ever seen. Montres-de-luxe, the French site that identified the watch (and spotted a diamond-set piece on Foxx it could not pin down), also noted the catch: Rolex did not unveil the Yacht-Master II until 2007. The lawyer who turned another man's yacht into a courtroom exhibit argues the whole film wearing the brand's yacht-racing watch, in solid gold, twelve years early.