Novelistic Storytelling

Rating: 9/10 (15 April 2018)

This is the kind of movie people who read books love. Although the plot spans less than 10 years, it has an epic feel. Family relationships, racism, poverty and combat trauma are intertwined in the story of two families and the Deep South culture in which they live in the early to mid 1940s.
A white land-owning family and a black tenant-farmer family are interdependent on each other, both poor, the black family only more so. Despite trauma and brutality (one scene is especially violent), the movie was not depressing. The reality of the dependence of farmers on the weather, the land and luck is a subtle theme in the background of this film about characters. The ironic experience of black soldiers who fought for a still-segregated home country returning to that culture is the films' dramatic crux. There are probably many historical lessons for younger people in this film.