First rate ideas, great filming, and some missed chances for a great movie

Rating: Null/10 (28 March 2018)

Mudbound (2017)
A beautifully filmed movie, and with an important if simple message of being good-and about not being racist. Set in the deep South, the movie has an entrenched racism that some would call a normal segregated world around the time of WWII. As the inequality (and brutality) of the times is driven home, suddenly the war comes along, and a white man and a black man are each sent to fight in different units.
The rest of life continues (and it's all rather vivid and realistic). But when the two men come home and they realize the have in common the experience of the war, and that this trumps any racial hatred they had been brainwashed with, the story makes some dramatic and moving turns.
The cinematography is by Academy Award nominee Rachel Morrison (the first woman ever nominated), and I actually think she should have won. (The winner in 2017 was the man who shot the new "Blade Runner" and for me the visuals were more to do with set design and special effects than actual photography. But that's me.) The style was a modified cinema verité, with some handheld camerawork and generally in the middle of things kind of shooting that really works.
The acting is great throughout, including by the women who are main characters without being designated that way (the men are officially running the story). What sometimes holds the movie back is the simple and even predictable manner that the story is told. There is room here for more than the obvious and the dramatic (which you will see a lot of)-the nuances of character, and of motivation and meaning, are not exploited a bit. And that's what would have made it a great movie instead of merely a very good and well-intentioned movie.
Director Dee Rees deserves due credit for pulling this off in a way that is important and sincere. I'm not sure how big her role was in the screenplay, but maybe someone needs to figure out how movies can really soar above the big themes that are shouting for attention and find the little nuances that make us really laugh and weep.