Loving

In “Loving”, based on Loving v. Virginia, the monumental 1967 civil rights case that overturned the prohibition of interracial marriage, writer/director Jeff Nichols becomes one of the precious few to find a way to render a historical drama without any of the obviousness and pomp that traditionally plagues the genre. “Loving” is not merely resistant to big speechifying, it is resistant to aesthetic bombast, forgoing swelling strings, fancy orations and white light streaming in windows that bathes characters so as to render them divine. Instead it adopts a refreshing matter of fact process akin to the workmanlike brick laying that one of its two main characters, Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton), does for a living. I don’t know if “Loving” is a Great Movie, per se, but it’s about as well done as this kind of movie can be.

Nichols conspicuously forgoes a traditional introduction to Richard and Mildred’s (Ruth Negga) relationship. In the first scene, we learn she is pregnant, which prompts their marriage, but this is not a marriage of circumstance. They really do love each other, which the companionable performances of Edgerton and Negga, who so fluently interact in one another’s presence, evinces with such grace. We don’t see how they got together just as we don’t see them wrestling with what it means in a broader social context for them to be together; “Loving” merely introduces them as they are. That’s not to suggest they don’t feel the societal repercussions as they catch stares from black and whites alike, because they do, but that to them this seems beside the point. Until, that is, they go up to Washington to wed, return to Virginia and get thrown in jail.

They are told by the Judge (David Jensen), a character that Nichols shrewdly writes not as some exaggerated villain but an exhaustible man set in his ways, that to stay married and avoid jail means they must leave Virginia for a period of 25 years. They do, moving in with Mildred’s relatives, occasionally daring to make an undercover of night foray back home, getting by, until an ACLU lawyer named Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) gives them a call about taking their case up the chain to the Supreme Court. It’s about doing right by the Lovings, absolutely, but it’s also about getting a horrible bit of racist policy off the books, which you suspect could have been done a tad earlier than 100 years since the conclusion of the Civil War except that American-styled progress is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really slow.

In another movie, Cohen would have been just as crucial to the plot as Richard and Mildred. When Bernie says he’s not really that familiar with constitutional law, it would have been cue for a law book reading montage, or something, but Nichols has no real interest in the finer points of the lawyerly crusade. Instead, in a story born of Loving v. Virginia, Loving v. Virginia becomes a mere subplot, an ineffable reminder that Nichols feels no annoying need to hammer home the stakes, other than the marriage license that Richard nails to the wall, that even a landmark civil rights case spawns from someplace small, like Lake Itasca sending the Mississippi on its winding journey.

This is befitting the central couple. Richard is almost exclusively inward, not particularly excited about all the media fuss that goes along with their court case, happiest when he’s at the dinner table or laying bricks, and Edgerton embodies this character’s demure mannerisms with all his silent might. Mildred, on the other hand, is more aware of the significance of what’s coming them from their challenge, intrinsically reminding us that the plight of Black Americans has always been different and so much harder than that of White America, which Negga only allows to come out in the smallest ways, in the politely excited manner that she repeatedly tells her lawyers “We appreciate you” or in the bashful way she lets a Life photographer snap her photo at the kitchen sink. And when the big moment comes at the end and the case is tried for the Supreme Court justices, Negga makes clear that her character stays behind with Richard who has no intention of going, not because she’s some dutiful Stepford Wife but because she loves him and believes they go together.

That moment precipitating the Supreme Court showdown, which is only seen obliquely, is also seen in the trailer. It is Richard saying: “You tell the judge, I love my wife.” Even in the trailer Edgerton’s restraint on this line is admirable, but it packs even more of a wallop in the full context, of everything that has come before and everything that is still at stake. He loves his wife. She loves him. It’s never really supposed to be that simple, certainly not in 1960s America, and yet in Nichols’s telling, it absolutely is.

Mud

In the dark of the morning two young boys in rural Arkansas, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and the colorfully named Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), hop aboard a rusty motorboat and light out, and if it wasn’t for that motor and the walkie-talkies with which they have been communicating it might be easy to mistake this brewing adventure as being straight out of Mark Twain’s days. They motor up the tributary alongside which Ellis’s houseboat home rests and pause at that point where the water spills into the mighty Mississippi River. Neckbone notes the trouble that awaits them for venturing further. This is an exemplary illustration of two fourteen year old boys standing on the very cusp of leaving adolescence behind for the rigors of young adulthood. Into the river they go.

Their destination is an uninhabited island where schoolboy tall tales tell of a boat lodged high in the trees. Sure enough, they make this discovery for themselves, only to discover that someone else has beaten them to their dream treehouse and called dibs. This is the man named Mud, played by Matthew McConaughey in a linen shirt he wears for luck and a pistol tucked away for protection. He comes covered in grime and sweat and speaks in a drawl suggesting someone who has done his fair share of hard living. Every actor here is good but the recently resurrected McConaughey is stellar, playing a role that easily could have given way to a showy caricature. Instead he conveys both a temperamental man with secrets lurking and a charismatic man with the noblest intentions.

He is waiting on Juniper, the woman for whom he will and has gone to the ends of earth. She is played by Reese Witherspoon, an angel with a halo of cigarette smoke and sorrow. At first glance she may appear to be another in a long line of underwritten female characters but look again and what you find is a character whose depth and shading is almost entirely provided when she is off screen. It is other characters who tell us who and what they think she is and what motivates her. That we never know precisely is sort of the point because, above all, she is a beacon to our man Mud. He hopes to rendezvous with her and squire her to a metaphorical bed of roses. 

Alas, the requisite men in suits with slicked-back hair and guns wait to foil this plan for reasons not to be revealed. So Mud enlists the help of Ellis and Neckbone to bring the sacred boat down from the tree and patch it up in order to hatch a rescue mission. But before they do Ellis has a lone question: “Do you love her?”

There are themes aplenty in "Mud" but at the forefront is love – first love, true love, everlasting love, phony love, the way you can be in love and in hate with the same person at the same time. It is not merely about the long distance, time-tested love of Mud and Juniper but about Ellis’s infatuation for an older, taller girl (Bonnie Sturdivant) for whom he stands up and about the marriage of Ellis’s mother (Sarah Paulson) and father (Ray McKinnon) disintegrating. Even Neckbone’s Uncle (Michael Shannon) is introduced running afoul of a pretty lady who probably deserves better.

This is an awful lot of material to juggle in conjunction with the bad guys and boat repair but Jeff Nichols, a native of Arkansas and working as both writer and director, is in supreme control of nearly every facet of this superb film. The pace is perfect, never rushed and never slack, and, demonstrating the hallmark of genuinely great filmmaker, he possesses implicit faith in the story, never resorting to cheap camera tricks to tell it or punch it up.

His pen would do a playwrite – like, say, Sam Shepard, who appears here in a small role on the outer edges of the tale who has secrets of his own and will ultimately factor in mightily – proud. He tells us all we need to know in a few lines, several words. “You’re married. You’re supposed to love each other.” “Yeah, I don’t know about that.” Also, notice the scene in which Shannon’s Uncle makes clear to Ellis that he is aware he and his nephew are up to something but that he has trust in Ellis to make the right decision.  And he knows that in one of the most critical moments of all its build-up has been so monumental no words would do it right. Thus, he settles for a series of brief shots and a couple subtle waves of the hand that might very well have made this reviewer well up.

The only time "Mud" really steps wrong is in the climax when things not only are a bit too neatly aligned but become too overheated. There is the old notion of Chekhov’s Gun – stipulating that if you show a gun in the first act then it has to be fired later. If not, don’t show it. But not all rules are hard and fast and I suspect even Chekhov himself would acknowledge the need to occasionally tell rules what to go do with themselves. The film rebounds, however, in time for a few closing shots of clarifying grace. Boys have taken their first tentative steps toward manhood and men have re-proved that lessons never cease to be learned, but that as cruel as the world is some sense of ideals must and will be maintained.

Early on Mud sits beneath the trees with his two new best pals, glances up at the boat and remarks: “It’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it?” It sure is.