‘Mudbound’ Is a Complicated, Worthy Film About Life in the Post-WWII South
The finely wrought Netflix Original is ultimately better at serving up a slice of the history at its center than it is at conjuring the kind of rich melodrama that this history deserves, but it is a satisfying and compelling film nonetheless
“I was a 31-year-old virgin when I met Henry McAllan in the spring of 1939,” says Laura McAllan (Carey Mulligan), one of a handful of narrators guiding us through Mudbound, a new Netflix Original film. Laura is a college-educated woman still living with her parents in Memphis when her handsome future husband, the serious, straightforward Henry (Jason Clarke), comes and sweeps her off her feet. World War II is just getting underway. The happy couple makes a plan to move with their two (eventually three) kids and Henry’s father, Pappy, to a big house in Mississippi. It’s a sudden decision: One day, without much warning, Henry is bitten by the itch to become a farmer.
It’d be nice if this had worked out. But Mudbound is, above all, a story of twisted, tangled, sometimes unpredictable fates--and the move to Mississippi is the first sign. There would be no big house--Henry gets fleeced by their ostensible renter. Instead, the McAllans wind up nearby, in the mud, downgraded from a house overlooking a farm to a house planted square in the middle of one, out where the poor whites and black sharecroppers live. “You’re gonna love it,” Henry promises his wife before they move, ignorant of the muddy hell that awaits. “I dreamed in brown,” says Laura, remembering the misery of Mississippi some years later.
Mudbound, based on the 2008 novel by Hillary Jordan, was helmed by Dee Rees, an insightful director who landed on the scene in 2011 with her well-received queer coming-of-age tale, Pariah. That movie is intimately told, pared down to the essentials. Mudbound, a historical drama, is decidedly more vast. The movie is a deft tale of parallel lives and separate fates. There’s the story of the McAllans, on the one hand, and the hell of marriage for Laura in particular, for whom the move to Mississippi is a complete upheaval of the quiet, cultured normalcy she’d known until then. And then there’s the Jacksons, a large family of black sharecroppers, now working under the employ of Henry McAllan, who’ve got their dreams set on buying and working their own plot of land someday. Both of these families send a man to war: For the McAllans, it’s Henry’s younger brother, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), and for the Jacksons, it’s the oldest son, Ronsel (Jason Mitchell). As depicted by Rees and her cast, this is more than mere coincidence. The movie, with its tours of racialized labor, Jim Crow laws, and domestic discontent, is ultimately an exploration of what it means to be divided by circumstance but united by work--and by mud. But it’s also the story of the two men who, despite the differences defining their world, are bonded by war.
It’s a complicated, worthy film, a finely wrought drama that’s ultimately better at serving up a slice of the history at its center than it is at conjuring the kind of rich, vexed melodrama that this history deserves. It’s compelling nonetheless. As with many other book-to-movie adaptations, Mudbound is a film that lets voiceovers do a lot of the work. We hear from almost everyone who matters: Jamie, Laura, the Jackson matriarch Florence (Mary J. Blige), and others. Their stories are our anchor. Laura tells us of the hardships of this newfound farm life over images of her trying, unsuccessfully, to wash off the mud that seems to cling to her like a second skin. Florence unspools tales of hardship, too, but with a greater sense of resigned patience.
When Laura’s children become sick, it’s clear that Florence, who was once a midwife, has to step in and help; it would hurt her own family’s income, but Henry’s firm request isn’t really a request. This is simply, the movie tells us, what the black laborer is understood to have to do. “I didn’t have the luxury of only loving my own children,” Florence tells us with muted calm, reminding us that Mudbound’s sense of life for blacks, women, and everyone at the intersection of the two is riddled with compromises. There’s the life Laura gives up to move to Mississippi on the whims of her husband; there’s the freedom the Jacksons, being so tied to their lives working the land, never really had. Mudbound’s emphasis is on the non-options history has tended to provide. The movie gives you a sense of the kind of desperation that would drive a man to try to work the fields with a horribly broken leg, skin pierced by bone.
Blige is almost unrecognizable in the movie, her face obscured by a large pair of shades and a straw hat. It’s one of the more surprising performances of the year, as Blige holds her own with--and even, on some occasions, out-acts--established players like Mulligan and Clarke. The best performance of them all, however, is by Jason Mitchell as Ronsel. His is the character whose fate best summarizes the irony of history. He’s a man who fights in Germany, comes back a hero, but still has to use the back door of the local grocery when he gets home. His budding friendship with Jamie McAllan is moving, in part, because Jamie, who recounts having his life saved by a black pilot while overseas, treats him like an equal.
Mudbound is rich with complicated connections like these. There are suggestions of unspoken romance between Laura and Jamie, for example; there’s a whole world of relations that Ronsel has overseas, some of which we learn of in due time. It’s a movie that’s much bigger than its premise--and much wilder, and more fraught, than the style Rees relies on to depict it. The cinematography is quite something, sophisticatedly rich, with sensitivity for the full range of the characters’ skin tones, and of the tones in their environment, without either coming off as too glossy or too gritty.
How those images function relative to the plot is another matter. Rees’s style is as subtle and tactile as it is plain in its mission to simply tell a good story. That’s a worthy cause, but Mudbound, though satisfying, is a little hampered by the emphasis on good storytelling at the expense of really taking advantage of all the fury, fear, exhaustion, disgust, and melancholy central to the narrative. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of details. A more curious movie might have given us a greater sense of the work of sharecropping and its role as a physical and spiritual trial, rather than just (for the black characters) a given condition of history. Sometimes, watching Mudbound, it’s hard to escape the sense that the history--rather than the filmmaking--is doing most of the work.
The script is more adventurous than the resulting movie. And when shit finally hits the fan, which feels inevitable from its opening moments, those seams really show. But it’s a worthy turn for Rees in that it allows her to flex her knack for intimacy and, above all, for sympathy. The movie isn’t great, but it suggests that its maker might be.