Tag Archives: Jeff Nichols

Loving

Loving
Loving

Seen at Cannes International Film Festival 2016

Format: Cinema

Release date: 3 February 2017

Distributor: Universal

Director: Jeff Nichols

Writer: Jeff Nichols

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Marton Csokas, Nick Kroll, Michael Shannon

USA, UK 2016

123 mins

Loving is as good as a drama can be, but for everyone who admires the director’s earlier films, it might be a disappointment.

Loving is Jeff Nichols’s second film to be released this year. The first was Midnight Special, a sci-fi drama about family and belief, which premiered at the Berlinale in February. It’s also the second time the director has worked with Joel Edgerton, who this time plays Richard Loving, a white bricklayer from Virginia who invited the wrath of the state when he married his beloved Mildred, a woman of African-American and Native American descent. Ruth Negga plays his wife and together the two actors turn in the finest, most understated performances of the festival so far. The Lovings, we realise soon, are people of very few words, and so they make every look, every gesture, every intonation count instead.

In order to be together though, the newly wed couple is forced to make a deal to leave their Virginia home and promise they won’t return for at least 25 years. Time passes as they retreat to Washington DC to raise their family, but Mildred struggles to fully adjust to life in the city and, in her despair, writes a letter to Bobby Kennedy explaining the circumstances and asking for help. What follows is the Lovings fight to return to Virginia as a free family. It’s a fight that eventually will go all the way to the federal Supreme Court, and one that changed history.

Loving is as good as a drama can be, but for everyone who admires the director’s earlier films, it might be a disappointment. It’s a film by Nichols rather than a ‘Jeff Nichols film’, the main difference being that in making the political personal, Loving simply lacks the strangeness and dark power of films like Shotgun Stories (2007) and Take Shelter (2011). What’s more, it seems that since flirting with Hollywood in Mud (2013), Nichols has gone off on a tangent and it’s not clear whether or not he too will find his way home again.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our Cannes 2016 coverage.

Mud

Mud
Mud

Format: Cinema

Release date: 10 May 2013

Distributor: Entertainment One

Director: Jeff Nichols

Writer: Jeff Nichols

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Reese Witherspoon

USA 2013

130 mins

The latest film from Jeff Nichols tells the tale of Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), two poor 14-year-old Arkansas kids whose attempt to claim a boat stranded high up in the branches of a tree by floodwaters brings them into contact with Mud (Matthew McConaughey), a strange, charismatic drifter, who has taken the vessel to use as his base of operations. He is apparently back in town to rescue the love of his life, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), from some nameless trouble, and the boys are quickly drawn deeper and deeper into his schemes, unaware of how much danger they are putting themselves in, never asking themselves who Mud is hiding from, and why.

Mud clearly sets out from frame one to run along well-worn tracks – it’s like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn meets Whistle down the Wind (1961). Ellis (and this is mainly Tye Sheridan’s film) is a boy of unusual determination, who is appalled that his parents are about to break up and that the boat they live upon is going to be demolished by the river authority. He seems to seize upon Mud’s mission to prove something to himself about love and life. Mud himself is a semi-mystical character, a full grown child of nature with his own set of rituals and talismans, a romantic, not quite living in the real world. Much of the surrounding cast are a series of fathers and father-figures (Ray McKinnon, Michael Shannon, Sam Shepard, Joe Don Baker) offering alternative models and down-home wisdom on women and the messy business of being a man.

The trouble is that having masterfully set up all this classic Americana rites of passage stuff, Nichols simply doesn’t follow through with it. I was continually expecting the creator of Shotgun Stories (2007) and Take Shelter (2011) to get a little darker or weirder, to defy my expectations. But although there are areas of ambiguity (mainly centred around Juniper, a kind of white-trash femme fatale, mortified by her ability to cause misery), in the end, hard life lessons are learned, shady characters come good, the bad guys are confronted and all is resolved. So in the end, it’s just too… straightforward.

It’s still a quality piece of filmmaking, the photography is fluid, unflashy and pretty damn gorgeous, with a wide palate of mood and light. You can feel the heat and humidity, the stifling small town boredom. All the details seem right, the bootleg Fugazi t-shirt, the cans of Beanie Weenies bought from the Piggly Wiggly. And that great cast is pretty much faultless. I couldn’t help wondering, though, how the film would have played with Nichols-regular Shannon in the lead instead of McConaughey (who’s at his best, as far as I’m concerned, playing outright bastards) and whether, in that case, we’d have something a little more troubled, unsettling and notable. Ah well…

Mark Stafford

Watch the trailer: