Movie Review: Mud
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
Premiering at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in the prestigious vanguard of movies “In Competition,” director Jeff Nichols’ third film, Mud, was surely too modest and commercial to win the Palme d’Or – though the 33-year-old made a splash at the festival in 2011 when his intense drama Take Shelter took the Grand Prize, giving Nichols a name on the international stage.
Mud is a more meandering but still entertaining affair – two boys happen on a fugitive making his hideout on an isle in Arkansas in a symbolically-heavy wrecked boat aloft in a tree, no doubt set there by the weather catastrophes of recent times (shades of a modern Noah tale perhaps). “Mud” as played with his usual amiable charm by Matthew McConaughey has killed his ex-girlfriend’s abusive, mobbed-up lover and has a large bounty on his head. He seems like a nice enough fellow so the two boys hatch a plan to take his messages to town and eventually get that boat afloat so Mud can escape. Along the way, there are subplots touching on the disappointments of young love, suburban creep and government intervention changing the Southern way of life, and the fact that there is a generation of self-reliant rural kids forced to behave as adults early in life (something we also saw in last year’s child-hero favorite Beasts of the Southern Wild). Coddling modern parents can watch these movies from afar to appreciate the kind of lyrical youth denied a more hardwired, urbanized generation of kids.
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Fitting into a southern storytelling tradition that harkens back to Mark Twain and the more coherent work of William Faulkner (plus the South’s particular way with the Bible), Mud is best when relaxing into the naturalistic byplay between the impressive young leads (Tye Sheridan from The Tree of Life and newcomer Jacob Lofland) as they take on Mud’s tasks in the name of love. Sheridan’s Ellis is the movie’s true focus – a sweet-faced boy with warring parents suffering the pangs of first infatuation with an older popular girl, determined to rescue Mud from his predicament; since the title character spends much of the running time stuck in his remote hideaway, we see the world of adults and their sins through the eyes of Ellis and his more aggressive counterpart “Neckbone” (Lofland). Eventually, Reese Witherspoon makes a glorified cameo as the battered trollop Juniper in who Mud has placed his hopes of salvation.
Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland in “Mud.”
Photo by Jim Bridges – © 2013 – Roadside Attractions.
There are a few too many subplots to give the film the urgency it requires to be a completely successful thriller and a little more humor might have helped to balance the leisurely pace and multitude of somber, reflective moments that burden the story as the plots converge and bullets solve most of the story goals. As a follow-up to his startling previous effort, Mud is a safer gamble for Nichols but is still evidence of a confident young voice joining the ongoing dialogue (along with Beasts, Treme, Winter’s Bone) about the peculiarities of the remote parts of the South and the ramifications of the disasters incurred there.
And yes, McConaughey eventually takes his only shirt off, but this time not as a direct pandering to his enamored fans, but rather in a gesture of “white flag” surrender – the kind of symbolism that gives Mud an air of artful mystery that keeps the overarching plot from seeming too simplistic – but just so.
Gregory Fichter
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