Much of It Is Good but None of It Is Great

Rating: 7/10 (27 November 2017)

You can practically hear the gears grinding as "Mudbound" attempts to add a relevant voice to the current troubled conversation surrounding race in America. Nothing wrong with relevancy, and I hope other filmmakers continue to bring stories to the screen that place minorities front and center and make people uncomfortable by forcing them to confront unpleasant truths. I just wish "Mudbound" was a better movie. Don't get me wrong; it's a good movie. I thoroughly liked it while I was watching it, but it didn't resonate with me, and it didn't linger in my mind the way the some of the best and most troubling films do.
Set in World War II era Mississippi, "Mudbound" tells the story of a white family that takes over a farm and becomes the new employer of a family of black tenant farmers. World War II then intervenes and sees a slew of young men, white and black, go off to fight. When they come back, they find themselves having trouble acclimating back to a world so rigidly defined in terms of race.
"Mudbound" more than anything tries to be fair, which I guess is a valiant ambition and probably a needed one when we have social media hectoring us day and night and telling us we're either entirely right or entirely wrong. The movie shows us the worst of white racism in the character of a repellent patriarch who borders on caricature and rounds up the local chapter of the KKK to teach a young black man a lesson. But it also gives us white characters who are understanding and willing to forget about racial differences when faced with trials that seem far more important. One of those white characters is played by Carey Mulligan, whose dependence on the wife and mother of the tenant family (Mary J. Blige), first when her children are sick with whooping cough and then later when she miscarriages, is the catalyst for a tenuous bond to form between the two women. The other white character is played by Garrett Hedlund, whose PTSD leads him to the son of the tenant family, who also went to war and is one of the only people he feels can understand him.
I have a feeling "Mudbound" will be largely ignored come awards season, and I have to admit that I will agree if it is. Much of it is good, but little of it is good enough. No doubt when it is passed over, we will have to endure another uproar over how white Hollywood is and how black actors and stories never get nominated. God knows Hollywood does need to give us more black stories and, while "Mudbound" is not the movie upon which to hang that particular argument, I do hope filmmakers keep trying.
Grade: B+