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I did manage to see Dee Rees’ Mudbound in July, as I intended, but I’ve been sitting on it ever since because I’m not sure what to say about it. It’s an excellent movie, and I liked it, but I didn’t enjoy it, if that makes sense. It’s a movie in which a succession of bad things happen, and you can feel all the while that something terrible is coming down the pipeline, but there’s nothing to do about it but wait with mounting dread.
At base, Mudbound is an ensemble story about the intersecting lives of two families in Mississippi in the years around World War II: the Jacksons, a black family of tenant farmers, and the McAllans, the white family that buys the land the Jacksons farm. Although race forms a barrier between the two families, their proximity forces a connection between them.
At first, this connection takes the form of a semi-feudal bond. The McAllans expect the Jacksons to help out as a matter of course whenever asked; the Jacksons naturally resent this, but are in no position to argue. But after the sons of both families return home from World War II, their shared experience as soldiers leads them to strike up a friendship.
The landlord-tenant relationship was perfectly respectable, but a genuine friendship, fraught though it sometimes is by racial tension, is entirely at odds with prevailing values. It’s a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off, and it does.
It’s a well-made film - beautifully shot, well-acted, with a clutter to the sets that makes the places look lived in. Indeed, the Jacksons’ cabin has a positively homey glow in some scenes, although never so pronounced as to make their poverty seem anything but unsentimentally grinding. Indeed, “unsentimental and grinding” would be a good description of the film itself: it does what it sets out to do and it does it beautifully, but oh, it’s exhausting to watch.
At base, Mudbound is an ensemble story about the intersecting lives of two families in Mississippi in the years around World War II: the Jacksons, a black family of tenant farmers, and the McAllans, the white family that buys the land the Jacksons farm. Although race forms a barrier between the two families, their proximity forces a connection between them.
At first, this connection takes the form of a semi-feudal bond. The McAllans expect the Jacksons to help out as a matter of course whenever asked; the Jacksons naturally resent this, but are in no position to argue. But after the sons of both families return home from World War II, their shared experience as soldiers leads them to strike up a friendship.
The landlord-tenant relationship was perfectly respectable, but a genuine friendship, fraught though it sometimes is by racial tension, is entirely at odds with prevailing values. It’s a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off, and it does.
It’s a well-made film - beautifully shot, well-acted, with a clutter to the sets that makes the places look lived in. Indeed, the Jacksons’ cabin has a positively homey glow in some scenes, although never so pronounced as to make their poverty seem anything but unsentimentally grinding. Indeed, “unsentimental and grinding” would be a good description of the film itself: it does what it sets out to do and it does it beautifully, but oh, it’s exhausting to watch.
