On the heels of his debut feature, Shotgun Stories
(which I loved) and his more widely seen follow-up, Take Shelter (which
I liked, with some reservations), writer-director Jeff Nichols has quietly
emerged as one of my favorite movie storytellers on the subject of the aching,
punch-drunk heart of the American underclass. In his newest, Mud,
he has offered up his most narratively conventional movie, one that feels, in
its roots of boyhood restlessness and fantasies of escape, like a tall tale
spun by a realist with romance in his bones.
Matthew McConaughey is the titular figure of mystery, a
river island recluse discovered by two bored, adventurous young boys, Ellis
(Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) who boat to the spot where he’s
hiding in search of a boat impossibly nestled high in a tree which Neckbone
claims to have seen. They find the boat and discover Mud living in it,
subsisting on canned food and whatever fish he can snatch out of the river. He
befriends the boys with tales of past loves and past crimes which may or may
not be entirely true—Mud claims to have killed a man who seduced and humiliated
Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), the woman he loves-- and entreats them both to
keep his whereabouts secret until he, with their help, can get the boat down
from its perch, rescue his fair maiden (who Ellis has spotted skulking down the
aisles of the local Piggly Wiggly) and sail off into the life together they've
always been denied.
As Mud’s story develops, so too does a sense that we
may be one step ahead of the director as far as the plot goes. But the movie
has a seductive, almost undulating quality about it that keeps the audience
slightly off balance, and enough almost subliminally syncopated beats to
suggest a heart that has its own special intent. Gordon teases beauty and dread
out of the mundane surroundings of the boys’ hometown as well as the gorgeously
rendered riverside Arkansas landscapes; there are mysterious, dread-infused
shots of creeping wildlife and magnificently ominous views of a great, still
body of water pouring out into an ocean of unknowable vastness that seem to
promise freedom. All the while, the tendencies of Terence Malick or early David
Gordon Green toward weighing the imagery down with preciousness, unearned
sentiment or insistent visual allusions are cleanly avoided. There is little
sense that Gordon has anything but the story he's ostensibly there to spin
forefront in his heart and mind.
Mud
is populated with men and boys who have been, in one way or another,
abandoned by the women in their lives, but it hasn't been fashioned as a plea
for undue sympathy on behalf of Males Behaving Ignorantly. Nichols is smart enough
to trust the audience to feel sympathy for both sides of the equation—it’s
never shrill or judgmental, even when it’s apparent that it’s the men who are
operating more blindly on stubborn expectations of the way life should be.
Mud's idealized fantasy projections of Juniper are pretty clearly delusional
right from the start, even as the facts of their separation seem to line up
with his version of the story. But again, the movie holds him responsible for
not being able to disassociate himself from her behavior when he can clearly
see that she's not measuring up to his (impossible?) ideal. And the movie holds
sympathy for her in that she's as lost as he is-- she's never turned into a
demon. Ellis' mom (Sarah Paulson) is in subdued conflict with her husband (Ray
McKinnon), a conflict her son can’t help but sense and internalize. She wants
to pack their marriage in and move out of the couple’s ramshackle houseboat,
but the movie seems entirely sympathetic to her point of view even as it also
makes room for the feelings of the men and their resistance to having their life
on the river up-ended. And even Ellis' would-be girlfriend May Pearl isn’t
depicted as vicious-- she's just an immature teenaged girl who likes the
attention she gets from this scrappy kid three years or so her junior, even
though she has no intention of reciprocating it.
As has been true in his two previous films, Nichols finds
ways (and not always the most obvious ones) to make the people breathe among
their surroundings in a way that should be the envy of lesser talents (like The
Paperboy’s Lee Daniels, for example) who seek to steam up Southern
atmospherics without a thought to what would make anyone want to live in the
region in the first place. Mud also shares with Bernie and Killer
Joe a distinct resistance toward broad, conveniently condescending
caricatures of Southern eccentricity, a trait perhaps further reinforced by
McConaughey's presence as well as Nichols’ own sensitivity, as a native
Arkansan, to the insistent allure of a place most would dismiss as hopelessly
backwater.
McConaughey is mesmerizing as Mud, a man whose sense
of pride has never left him, even if his face can’t help but reflect the
harshness of his life of exile. He has a weariness in his movement to go with
slightly wild eyes and a broken front tooth, all of which bear witness to the
imperfection and derailed life of a man who, in another life, might have been
heartened instead of hollowed out by love. In addition to McConaughey's
excellent turn-- which, after The Lincoln Lawyer, Killer Joe, Bernie, Magic
Mike and even a howling swamp mutt like The Paperboy, should no
longer come as a surprise-- Nichols coaxes fine work from capable and
underappreciated character actors like Witherspoon, who looks beautifully worn,
artfully shading the reality behind the image of her that Mud sells to himself
and the boys. Even in her sullenness she can’t quite hide the pleasure taken in
getting to do something other than a robotically pitched rom-com.
Also excellent are Ray McKinnon, as Ellis' sorrowful dad,
beleaguered by all the ways he's fallen short for his son, his wife and
himself; Sarah Paulson, gracefully avoiding histrionics; and Sam Shepard,
aging with a cantankerously pleasing touch of vinegar as Tom, a reclusive
loner whose military past, perhaps yet another of Mud's colorful elaborations,
may hold the key to Mud's murky future, and surely comes into play just when
all romantic fantasies look ready to finally yield to genre-inflected reality.
And certainly the movie wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does without the thoughtful,
unforced work of its young lead and his cohort in adventure. Both Sheridan and
Lofland, but especially Sheridan as Ellis, are naturally appealing and
realistically bitter-- Boy’s Life candidates who have already seen
enough jagged edges to make them suspicious of any stranger. But they’re also
ready for the challenge of helping Mud, holding as it does the promise of
bridging the life of a free-floating teen to the responsibility of edging
toward adulthood. Mud has some of the trappings of a genre that has come
to earn an audience’s dread—the coming of age story—but in these two young
actors' hands the ambiguous tension of growing up never yields to easy
sentimentality. Sheridan’s in particular is a terrific performance.
Mud does take a rather too obvious turn to the
melodramatic during its conclusion, after holding us so effortlessly with its
easy, unforced rhythms throughout. But I still prefer this rather more routine
wrap-up, with its nifty visual red herring that undercuts the audience's expectation
of the inevitable, to the indecisiveness of Take Shelter's apocalyptic
finish, which I feel never came down for its lead character's sanity or
delusion in a satisfying way. In his own fashion, Mud is surely as cracked as
Michael Shannon's storm-obsessed dad, but in his new movie Nichols is content
to let us empathize with this man's delusions, the sense that for characters
like Mud, Ellis and even Tom and Ellis's parents, there might be as much hope
for yet another regenerative dream as there is pain for the ones most recently
shattered.
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Posts
Over the next two and a half weeks Clark will
announce this year’s inaugural MHoF inductees, one each day, beginning with
previous Muriel anniversary award winners. Clark promises that many of the usual
suspects will naturally be present in the accounting, but he also says that some
surprises are also afoot. Muriel voters have also been asked to contribute some
writing about the movies they’ve voted for this year. Right now you can read
Phil Dyess-Nugent on past Muriel Anniversary winner The Seventh Seal and Peter Labuza on Vertigo. And coming soon, my own piece on a great and influential movie dear to my
heart—you’ll just have to keep clicking to find out what it is.
