An outstanding depiction of white fear, racism, and hatred. And black dignity.

Rating: 9/10 (28 January 2018)

This is not an easy film to sit through. The characters who portray the most ignorant among men, are very well played, especially by the venerable Jonathan Banks, who plays a man of such ignorance, it boggles the mind. He is the kind of father it is impossible to love.
The uneasy contradictions of the time period cut through skin and hit bone. During Jim Crow, a black man could go to war, liberating nations from Nazis in the name of the American ideal, and return home in uniform to find his flag-waving countrymen now shoving him out the back door of the general store. This happens in Mudbound, with the defiant yet vulnerable Jason Mitchell at its center as the WWII veteran Ronsel Jackson, and the stark hypocrisy depicted in the scene hits you in your gut. It foreshadows actual violence in the story, the kind that recalls Ronsel's real-life parallel Isaac Woodard, and that still reverberates today through Charlottesville and as far as the White House, where a man of such profound ignorance now leads the nation.
Mudbound makes its point by taking its time. You have to be patient with it. There's no drama in Mudbound. This is no 12 Years A Slave or Django Unchained. This is a quiet depiction of family life, about daily endurance and survival. And it is powerful in its mundanity. During the film's first hour, we observe strands of love and hatred thicken between the two families. Across their shared land grows a bond between the two mothers, Laura and Florence, played by Mulligan and Blige; a friendship between two sons home from the Second World War, Ronsel and Jamie, played by Mitchell and Hedlund; and a hatred for Ronsel boiling in the cruel heart of Jamie's father, Pappy (played by a formidable Banks), the senseless white supremacist who ultimately finds no logic beneath his bigotry.
The action, what there is of it, revolves around the elements: the sun, rain and flies, which are so oppressive they become characters in themselves. As does the mud. The families work on it every day. The mud is their livelihood. They are mudbound. The heavy sludge of the earth weighs upon the narrative and eventually becomes symbolic. The mud is suffocating, just like family; just like love; just like hate; just like racism. The mud, and Pappy's hate, bookends the film, which begins with Pappy digging a grave, and ends with workers lowering Pappy into his own grave. Into the mud.