Serenity

“Serenity”, released this past January to near-unanimous WTF? thumbs-downs, finds its leading man, Matthew McConaughey, firmly in the glorious post-McConaissance landscape, both totally attuned to the parodies of him and not so much transcending them as embracing with them with such wonky pep that he simultaneously makes you understand why they exist in the first place and why no parody of him is as good, never mind as funny, as the real thing. Here he is Baker Dill, deep sea fisherman on a fictional Floridian island called Plymouth, tormented by an elusive tuna, which just sounds funnier than elusive marlin, which was the fish that evaded Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea” and which “Serenity” sort of resembles, at least at first, gradually evolving (or: devolving) into “2001” penned by Hemingway, or something, an absurd-sounding amalgam that McConaughey nevertheless lends a crazed kind of credence, suggesting his “Mud” character if he never left the island and became spiritually sunburnt.

No actorly task goes unnoticed by McConaughey, squinting at the sky, scribbling coordinates, and manning a deep sea reel with equal ferocious commitment; when he tells a couple rich, drunk tourists who have rented his boat to sit back down when it’s time to try and catch fish you can tell in McConaughey’s unhinged expression that this stems not from safety protocol but trying to even the score with the sea. Even when he’s driving drunk he acts like a drunk guy trying to sober himself up while staying on the road. That might sound like nothing, but it as emerges as sort of incongruous with the screenplay in question, which becomes the movie’s downfall and saving grace, a leading man who, seemingly unbeknownst to writer/director Steven Knight, has broken his movie’s code.

Throughout we can tell the story is not so simple, and not just because of McConaughey. If the island is small and slow, where everyone knows everyone and “Old Wes” never leaves his table at the island’s lone bar, the editing never harmonizes with such a seeming life of leisure, opting for frequent cuts even in the simplest scenes, suggesting something weighing on Baker’s mind beyond his mysterious underwater opponent. Even when he lays up at nights, smoking, the island’s lighthouse shines its beam through his open windows, suggesting the beams of light eerily illuminating Rick Deckard’s apartment in “Blade Runner”, evoking neo-noir.

Indeed, “Serenity” truly begins its long strange trip to haywire when Baker’s ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) appears, suffering abuse at the hands of her new husband (Jason Clarke) for whom she has planned a fishing trip to Plymouth with emergent “Double Indemnity”-ish intentions. This ties back to her and Baker’s son, seen in isolated shots locked in his room playing video games, and who can apparently converse with his father, and father with son, through some sort of mystical connection never exactly defined but seen anyway. And this hints at The Big Twist.

Hathaway hints at it too, her sultry introduction involving a line reading so phonily femme fatale I laughed out loud. That phoniness permeates her entire performance, as if she’s taking her cues from someone else, a sensation connected to The Big Twist, one which is, without giving it away, a little underhanded in how it can be used to forgive any aesthetic sins as the whole point, insulting in how it lets the overriding implications of physical abuse simply slide and even a bit unpleasant in how it re-contextualizes preceding scenes, like a steamy scene between Baker and Karen in his boat cabin where his kiss-off line metamorphoses in retrospect from crudely comical to ewwwww, gross!

What’s worse, the twist isn’t all that flabbergasting, not merely telegraphed early and often but born of a thousand Big Twists before it. In the end, it’s got nothing on McConaughey anyway. He plays the climactic beach-set exposition scene not with an A ha! glimmer but a fatalistic edge, like he’s already advanced multiple levels beyond where the out-of-place character he’s conversing with is, level being a word I use with extreme intent. Because while “Serenity” proves overly concerned with who is playing God to make us go “Whoa”, McConaughey’s already left all that Big Twist bunk behind; he is the whoa. He’s not playing God; brother, he’s speaking to God.

5 More Matthew McConaughey Ad Campaign Ideas

On the heels of Matthew McConaughey’s infamous ad campaign for Lincoln, which found the Oscar-winning actor as some sort of metaphysical stunt driver, he has now announced his role as Creative Director in a new marketing op for Wild Turkey Bourbon. Perhaps, having conquered the Academy, The McCon’ now wants to conquer Advertising? If so, we here at Cinema Romantico did a brainstorming session to conoct a few more ad ideas he could pursue.

5 More Matthew McConaughey Ad Campaign Ideas

EXT. A DOCK SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS AT TWILIGHT

An old hound dog rests easy at the end of the dock.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY (VOICEOVER): When it comes to Texas Instruments, it’s all right there in the name. It’s a company that lets you kick off your flip-flops and put your feet up. It’s a corporation that takes you out on Lake Travis with some hot dogs and a cooler full of beer, prob'ly the cheap kind. It’s a business whose business cards are handshakes, and maybe a Bloody Mary down there at the Colonial Country Club. It’s an establishment that might be advanced in its applications of scientific know-how, but still puts paper napkins out on the picnic table. Texas Instruments… (easygoing pause) …maker of down home technology.

EXT. NEW YORK CITY

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, wearing a hoodie and ripped jeans, perhaps not having showered for a day or two, wanders the grimy streets, forlorn.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY (VOICEOVER): You’re famished. You haven’t eaten for days. Cuz nothing’s looked good. All the people prattling on about an “authentic New York slice”, but “New York” doesn’t interest you. You’ve been here too long. It’s run you ragged. It’s the reason you’re ravenous. You want an authentic slice of Italiana. Then, you see it.

Suddenly, Matthew McConaughey stands before a Sbarro. He enters.

INT. SBARRO

Except, it’s not an interior; it’s an exterior. It’s like Emilio Estevez walking into his dingy little motorhome in “National Loaded Weapon 1” only to realize the interior of that motor home is actually an opulent palace. The interior of Sbarro is improbably the exterior of the Tuscan countryside with a few vintage tables set up alongside the rolling, twinkling fields.

Matthew McConaughey, now outfit in a precisely cut Ermenegildo Zegna suit, strolls to one of hte tables and sits. Silvia Colloca, wearing a Sbarro uniform, walks up and sets a paper plate of ordinary cheese pizza in front of him. He picks it up and goes to take a bite, only to pause, look right into the camera and wink.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: La dolce vita.

The camera pulls away as Matthew McConaughey eats his slice.

EXT. LUXURY APARTMENT BUILDING 

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, wearing a top coat over a tuxedo, exits a limousine, bouquet of a dozen roses in hand. He walks with the camera, looking at it, toward the apartment building’s front door. 

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: “You’ll like it better or my name ain’t Orville Redenbacher.” That’s what my pops used to say. And pops’s promise ain’t never changed. 

The DOORMAN opens the door to allow Matthew McConaughey to enter. 

INT. LUXURY APARTMENT BUILDING 

Matthew McConaughey ascends the stairs, looking up at the camera peering down at him from above. 

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: Our Redenbacher commitment to top notch gourmet popcorn remains second to none. We’re the fluffiest, tastiest, healthiest and classiest choice. 

INT. APARTMENT DOOR 

Matthew McConaughey arrives and knocks on the door.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: ...the perfect option for a night in, or a night out when you reckon it's best to just stay in.

An ASTONISHINGLY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN answers the door. 

ASTONISHINGLY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN: Right on time. 

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: Brought you a little somethin’. 

He pulls the dozen roses out of the bouquet and hands them to her. Then, he reveals a bag of Redenbacher popcorn also tucked away within the tissue. The Astonishingly Beautiful Woman chucks the roses and takes the popcorn. She eats a couple kernels. 

ASTONISHINGLY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN: Mmmmmm. Best I’ve ever tasted. 

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY (looking at the camera): You’ll like it better or my name ain’t (dramatic pause) Grayson Redenbacher.

She pulls him inside the door closes.

EARLY AFTERNOON

The camera pans up from a nondescript parking lot, up and past a nondescript looking motel to find a roof, a red roof, baking in the hot morning sun. And a MAN, wearing a construction hat and safety vest, is baking on that roof too. The Man pauses in his work and notices the camera. He turns toward it. We realize the Man is Matthew McConaughey.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: Hey there. Ya snuck up on me. I was just laying some tile.

He stands straight, removes his hat and wipes the precipitous perspiration from his forehead.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: My name’s Matthew McConaughey, star of such feature films as “A Time To Kill” and “Dallas Buyers Club”. When I feel like getting away from the Hollywood suites and French villas, I like to come here, to the Red Roof Inn.

He puts his hat back on and sits down. He opens a cooler and removes a bologna sandwich. He takes a bite.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: The Red Roof Inn was founded in 1973 with the philosophy of providing guests a clean, comfortable room at an affordable price. I probably ain’t gotta tell you that philosophy ain’t changed much. Nope, red remains the motel color of the common man. And that’s why when I see these…

He holds up one of the red tiles.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: I know I’m gonna rest easy.

He puts the tile down. He takes another bite of his sandwich. He chews as the camera slowly pulls back.

INT. PLUSH PAD – LATE EVENING

A Celestron telescope stands on the edge of an avant garde living room, pointed to the right of the frame.

The camera gradually pans to the right to reveal MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, dressed to impress, sitting on a lustrous sectional, directly across from the telescope.

CUT TO

A shot over the head of Matthew McConaughey of the telescope.

CUT TO

A shot over the telescope of Matthew McConaughey.

CUT TO

A medium shot of Matthew McConaughey. He looks into the camera.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: Celestron. The only telescope that sees your soul.

FADE OUT

Matthew McConaughey Class Curriculum

Last week Kelsey Bradshaw of the San Antonio Express-News reported that Matthew McConaughey, whose famed renaissance of several years ago, has, depending upon which media outlet you read, completely dissipated, partially dissipated, been downgraded from a renaissance to a holding pattern, mathematically proven to have never existed, or merely transformed into a case of “hey, the McConaughey abides”, will return to his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, to teach a film class. He “will take students ‘behind the scenes’ of his upcoming film ‘Free State of Jones’ through recorded videos and at least one on-campus visit.” He will do this in tandem with “Free State of Jones” director Gary Ross, but c’mon now……we all know Mr. Ross is the mere teaching assistant to Professor McConaughey. And Professor McConaughey does not strike me as a stick-to-the-syllabus sorta instructor. So, if on the first day of class, Professor McConaughey teleports from videotape to the classroom and tells those starstruck students in his charge that he’s simply going to “feel” his way through this course, well, would that surprise you? Of course it wouldn’t.

And so we got to thinking. We got to thinking about what the first few weeks of a Professor Matthew McConaughey class might look like. This is what we determined.

Matthew McConaughey Class Curriculum

Week 1

“Every culture has its own lore pertaining to rocks, stones, gems, etcetera, and class, I assure you, Hollywoodland is no different. Take me for instance.” (He holds up a small stone.) “Now this, class, was a small piece of smoky quartz I found outside a taqueria in central Texas just prior to the filming of ‘Magic Mike.’ Now studies show that smoky quartz retains the ability to absorb and transmute all the negative energy that builds up inside you in order to release it back into the Earth where it is naturally neutralized. And ever since that film, that’s how I play my roles, unburdening myself of all the negative energy that this industry of motion pictures inevitably provides. So as your first assignment, class, I want you to go out there and scour campus, from the quad to the Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium parking lot to find your stone and whatever particular power it may possess. Because until you have your stone, and until you know your stone’s spiritual property and how it ties into your acting journey, that journey cannot commence.”

Week 2

“Now my first movie, as you may recall, was ‘Dazed and Confused’, helmed by my righteous amigo Rick Linklater. First day of shooting concludes and I see Rick and a couple sound guys setting up to record…..well, what? I didn’t know. So I asked. One of the sound guys said they needed some ‘room tone.’ ‘Room tone?’ I said. ‘What’s room tone?’ Now he told me that ‘room tone’ was the sound behind the sound, the background noise, captured in every location you shoot to ensure that what you hear sounds completely au naturel. But then afterwards, Rick came up to me, and he said ‘Matt, that's the literal definition of room tone. But that's not what room tone really is.’ So I asked, ‘Rick, amigo, I need to know the skinny. What is room tone...really?’ And he told me to stand still and not speak. So I did. I heard a floorboard creak. I heard a soft rustle. He said ‘Nah man, you’re listening. You’re not hearing.’ And then I got extra still. I didn't listen. I just......was. And then I heard it. I heard the scraping of the aural fingerprints across the chalkboard of the soul. Rick looked at me. He said: ‘See? Now that’s room tone.’”

Week 3

Matthew McConaughey and a student, Andrew, sit in an editing bay.

Andrew: “Man, I’ll never get this edit right.”
Matthew McConaughey: “I suggest you try ’er again, hombre. Only this time.....”
---Matthew McConaughey places a helmet on Andrew’s head that shields the student’s eyes.”
Matthew McConaughey: .“....let go your conscious self and rely on instinct.”
Andrew: “But with the blast shield down I can’t even see! How am I supposed to edit?”
Matthew McConaughey: “Your eyes can deceive you, hombre. Don’t trust ’em.”

Week 4

“Now a performance, class, both is and is not an immutable thing. It’s what you see, finite, like a classic Rock-Ola still getting the kicks out, but it’s also what you feel, in here-“ (thumps chest) “-as time goes by, your own personal philosophy morphing to make way for all kinds of new-fangled cogitations that arise from amassing knowledge . That’s why you’ve got to maintain the sense of the present but also see the future. You’ve gotta commune with what you wanna be while staying solid with who you are. Then, your whole self, there and to be there, will unify, and that will allow you to fully drill down to reach the soul of your character so that character is you and you are that character because, hey now, aren’t we all everyone anyway?”

Week 5

“Stephen H. Burum once said  ‘the art of cinematography is the art of lighting and making that light tell the story.’ And Mr. Burum's not wrong. Trouble is, when it comes to light, they wanna throw around a trove of elaborate terminology when movie lighting has nothing to do with the lights up here...” (He points at the fluorescent lights overhead) “...and everything to do with what’s in here.” (He points to his heart.) “Lighting, class, comes from within, and it is the actor’s ultimate responsibility to illuminate his or her surroundings, to effectively effuse the necessary effervescence to provide the director with precisely the level of brightness he or she seeks. Here. Let me show ya.” (He turns off the light. Five seconds pass. Matthew McConaughey literally glows.)

Interstellar

Discussing a Christopher Nolan film is impossible without discussing Christopher Nolan himself, and this is because the noted cinematic gigantist is a full-fledged auteur. His films, proudly, loudly (really, really loudly) bear his hallmarks – the ear-grating exposition, the sound design that may as well double as a pharmacy prescription for extra-strength aspirin and female characters as simplistic as his plots are labyrinthine. More than anything, though, they are spectacles – gargantuan populist spectacles, which is precisely why he is such a gladiator at the box office. He knows what movies audiences are. Movie audiences are the mob. Conjure magic for them and they will come to the theater in droves. “Interstellar” may be significantly flawed, but it may be Nolan’s grandest spectacle yet.

Even as “Interstellar” purports to explore the possibility of our future it seems to inhabit a specific place in the past, imagining the end of Earth as looking an awful lot like The Great Depression, a 1930's Dust Bowl as a plague on all our continents. Natural resources have become virtually non-existent, save for corn, which Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), our hero, grows while raising a stalwart son and precocious daughter with whom he has a close, combustive relationship that becomes the film’s main through line. Offering an ample dose of his traditional drawling charisma, McConaughey in this environment distinctly evokes the Chuck Yeager of "The Right Stuff", which is appropriate given Cooper's lament that the film's earth has traded looking to the stars for digging in the dirt.

Directly implying the planet’s demise is tied to its failure to shoot the moon, it consequently argues that it's only chance for survival is putting a little faith in science. And so once Cooper convolutedly (or is merely...miraculously?) happens upon a literally underground NASA run by his mentor, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), he and Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway) and assorted others will climb into a rocket ship to boldly go where several other men and one woman have already gone. That is, through a wormhole and to another galaxy where a trinity of planets might just offer hope for a new hospitable world to transport humans, so long as Dr. Brand can solve a riddle pertaining to gravity that flew over my head but which I'm sure Neil deGrasse Tyson and his legion of plot-hole-picking-out disciples would be happy to castigate for you.

For all its scientific gobbledygook, the overriding narrative theme of this epic odyssey to the far reaches of the cosmos is explicitly old-fashioned, summarized in the simple language of thousands of pop songs. “Do you believe in love?” Sir Huey Lewis asked rhetorically. “Oh, you can bet I believe it too.” To Nolan, however, themes are more like concepts, and even if love is an emotion, Nolan approaches it with all the thrill of a lab-coated pragmatist arguing his concept with an erudite term paper. He’s a maestro with effects but can’t convey actual human feeling with the camera. The relationship of a spurned daughter and a guilty father separated by galaxies is nothing much more than a game of emotional charades between ciphers.

The true ruin of Nolan, however, has long been exposition, and once again it crops up, threatening to be “Interstellar’s” waterloo. It’s not merely "disguising" theme as discourse - like having Hathaway annunciate the Love Theme in an extended monologue - but outfitting so many otherwise riveting in-space sequence with an out-loud explanation as to exactly what’s happening. It’s like the guy at the concert who won’t stop talking during your favorite song. And Nolan’s obsession with theoretical cogency routinely threatens to counteract the electricity of the sequences themselves. (No doubt the science itself would fail to appease him, but if you ever wondered how Mr. deGrasse Tyson would write dialogue...)

Still, for the endless chatter and weightlessness of the relationships, “Interstellar”, over and over, achieves transcendent flight, providing sequences of such raw movie-ness that the moviemaking itself is enough to lift you up and spackle over any flaws. Nolan’s real collaborator here is not his brother Jonathan, co-screenwriter, as much as it is his composer, Hans Zimmer, noted musical purveyor of bombast, who has concocted a score as colossal as the IMAX 70mm photography. Not content to just comment on the action, it becomes integral to it, and the sound design often overpowers the dialogue – further evidence the film not only would have benefited from its absence at many a moment but subconsciously intended for its characters to, more often than not, just zip it.

Early in the film, still back on the farm, Coop is ferrying his kids to school when an apparent drone swoops in and, suddenly, he swerves his broken old pickup off the dirt road and plows through his stalks of corn to give chase. The music soars and the camera assumes wings and even if you have no idea what is happening, it doesn’t matter, because the majesty of the moment tethers you to the screen, and all you are left with is sheer heartrending awe.

“Rage against the dying of the light.” That’s Dr. Brand borrowing the words of Dylan Thomas as a means to grant the mission a motto, but it might as well be the motto of Nolan, ambitious to the point of lunacy, raging against Lean Cuisine™ superhero epics and low budget handheld affairs of authenticity. If its astrophysics fail to check out, well, of course they do. This is not nuts and bolts but magic conjured.  

Dallas Buyers Club

There is a tight shot in which we find our protagonist Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey) splayed before a series of dimly lit red candles, confessing his sins, or, at the very least, pleading desperately with God to save his life or spare his soul, either/or. Then the shot switches. The camera is much further back and we realize he is not in a church confessing, but at a table in a dank strip club with a drink and a scantily clad woman gyrating in front of him. The meaning could not be more clear - saint and sinner, angel and devil.

That dichotomy is both striking and obvious, and that would be also an apt description for "Dallas Buyers Club", which in spite of being a rip-roaring, rule-breaking true life tale of a big hat, no cattle Texan diagnosed with HIV in the mid-80's, fits snugly into the limitations of the disease-of-the-week genre. Ultimately those limitations and its apparent disinterest in viewing the entire panorama of the AIDS crisis are rendered meaningless, and this is because of an astonishing lead performance by Matthew McConaughey, playing a part that doesn't seem a stretch but still feels brand new.

Woodruff, an insistent heterosexual with a thirst for booze, a lust for ladies, an occasional taste for drugs, and a damn the torpedoes attitude learns his diagnosis not far into director Jean-Marc Vallée's film. He is told he has thirty days to live by the requisite smug doctor (Dennis O'Hare) who knows better than him. (A requisitely luminous Jennifer Garner is the other doctor in order to ensure that doctors CAN be caring people!) Ron, of course, lives a lot longer, first popping too much of an unapproved drug that lands him back in the emergency room and then flying to Mexico and kicking off a whole new anti-FDA regimen that works well. So well, in fact, that Ron poses as a priest (saint/sinner!!!), smuggles in a trunk load of vials and cuts the ribbon on The Dallas Buyers Club, selling a cut-rate membership to the HIV infected for all the drugs they need. Legality, of course, is beside the point. "They're not illegal," Ron explains, "merely unapproved."

That line will make you realize just how charismatically McConaughey can turn a cliche, and that is what he does over and over throughout "Dallas Buyers Club", apparently indifferent to the screenplay's timeworn intention to set him forth on The Hero's Journey. He is introduced as a bigot, AIDS is made to be the problem, and the ensuing struggle is all about the elixir of redemption and enlightenment. To be sure, Ron Meets Cute with Rayan (Jarod Leto, gracefully subverting any hint of caricature), his transgender hospital room mate who will help to open this homophobe's eyes. Ah, but simply because Ron's eyes are opened, don't assume this will elicit a New Man.

In a way, Ron Woodruff is a Frank Capra Every Man for the Me Decade, presented more as a clever capitalist than an AIDS activist, simply finding a way to significantly profit from the sickly hand he's been dealt. Ethically he might be a schmuck, but damn if you can't admire his entrepreneurial craftsmanship, and it is through this medicinal trafficking that Ron's worldview is re-shaped. Who says good old fashioned American greed can't collide with a little good will?

The friendship between Ron and Rayan, the film's most vital, is primarily a business partnership, Rayan more or less acting as Ron's Buyers Club receptionist, a notion which actually plays straight to gender stereotypes. And that's how Ron, I think, wants it. Even having contracted HIV, even spending his days and nights in company of gays, Ron never quite warms to them nor even accepts them, but still manages to (amidst all the good ol' boy posing) quietly unearth a respect for them that goes beyond client/peddler. The way he deals with an ex-friend upon an un-friendly encounter in a grocery store is ripped from the pages of the Casting Stones Playbook, yet McConaughey makes it seems less a Victory For Civil Rights than an ornery Texan kicking ass and taking names.

Which is why the film's lack of focus on the Big Picture, the over-arching AIDS epidemic, the inequality to which the infected would have been subjected, feels correct for the material. Gay rights is important, don't get me wrong, but "Dallas Buyers Club" is all about one unlikely man's untraditional road to tolerance.

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.