A Melancholic Masters-Class in Filmmaking

Rating: 9/10 (5 December 2017)

Mudbound is an old-fashioned epic drama based on the penetrating novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan. The film follows a pair of families (one black and one white) who live and work on a tenement farm circa 1940. The McAllan's (the white family) were swindled out of a quaint antebellum home and forced to live in a hobble without water or electricity. The Jackson's on the other hand have lived on the plantation for generations and have acclimated to the harsh work and conditions – so much so that family patriarch Hap (Morgan) optimistically hopes to buy his small plot of land right out. But with the specter of WWII threatening to take away eligible family members the downwardly mobile McAllans and the upwardly mobile Jacksons are put on a path towards conflict and mutual destruction.
The film begins with the two McAllan brothers Henry (Clarke) and Jamie (Hedlund), at the end of their revelations, burying their dead father (Banks) amid the grime and the mud. The Jackson's, pulling all their worldly possessions on a mule-drawn cart are stopped in their tracks and asked by Henry to help in the burial. They oblige, though it is obvious from the context that if Hap and the scorned, hurt Florence (Blige) had their way, they'd be spitting in that grave instead of performing the eulogy.
The film then flashes back; juggling its sprawling, melancholic tale with a jumble of voiceovers starting with Henry's wife Laura (Mulligan), ending with Hap's son Ronsel (Mitchell). But what stands out in Mudbound is not so much the tale (though it is well written and realized) but the tone. Gone are the ambitious romanticisms of Gone with the Wind (1939) as well as the blunt moralizing of Hurry Sundown (1967). Instead we're pulled straight through into the languishing muck - harsh living, sweltering heat, putrid racism that's soaked into the skin like salty brine. These are the things that exist in the world of Mudbound.
The racism in this film comes in multiple forms though thankfully never in the form of an anachronism or a simple attitude in need of correction. Some facets are overt such as when Pappy McAllan sneers at the prospect of sitting next to Hap in a beat-up truck. Other times, the racism is more mundane, more insidious such as when Laura feels entitled to beckon Florence the middle of a storm to take care of one of her sick children. The bigotry and the entitlement blanket the film like a rolling fog. It's not an attitude but a state of being, a purposeful social stratification that's based on fear, resentment and hatred.
Rather than pouring a few spoonfuls of sugar in her deliberately paced drama, Director Dee Rees forces the audience to commit to her interrogation of history. This is not an easy movie to watch, not because it's particularly harrowing but because it lets you stew in its internal anguish. We're transported to a place in time, feel the sweat beading down the characters' back, hear the grackles mock their efforts on the farm and undergo the hunger pangs of families in need.
To further the misery en scene, Rees and cinematographer Rachel Morrison composed the frame so the digital high contrasts would reveal every pockmark in the light while shrouding every edge in darkness. The result feels like a colored, restrained version of a Dorothea Lange photo: earthy tones, undeniable humanism and a sad dignity eroded by the baser instincts of Jim Crow.
It is only at the hour mark that we see divergent perspectives via boys coming home from war. The color saturation changes ever so slightly as Ronsel and Jamie start to form a bond based on their mutual war experiences. By then the inner voices of our various narrators gel in an achingly poetic marriage of mood and mission. We begin to think there is light after all – a grimacing stoicism to the things that cannot be changed and cautious optimism going the other direction. Sadly it doesn't last.
Mudbound does a lot of things right including casting, directing and book-to-film adaptation. But what it does best is instill in its audience a sense of perspective. Come to think of it, the events of the film only took place seventy short years ago give or take. And while it's a work of fiction, none of the elements of the story deviate from the cold, harsh truths of the time. The film frames, contextualizes and investigates with only the deepest of emotional truths. Perhaps Laura says it best when she opines, "Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before thatyou still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect."