Pre-release buzz and the title of the film notwithstanding, Mud is not about Matthew McConaughey's eponymous drifter, hiding out on an island near the Arkansas/Texas border. In fact, though Mud is the prime mover of the plot and a constant shadowy presence even when he's not onscreen, the film's emotional arc sits entirely on the shoulders of Ellis (Tye Sheridan), a 14-year-old boy living on an ancient houseboat with his dissolute fisherman father (Ray McKinnon) and snappish, put-upon mother (Sarah Paulson), and to avoid his wearying home life, spends every summer day out in the watery places of Arkansas with his friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland). One day, they're on the hunt for to find a spectacular sight in the woods - a powerboat that managed to make it dozens of feet above ground in a tree - when the stumble across the tight-lipped Mud, who without even at first offering his fake name, convinces the boys to help him out by bringing supplies the island, while he waits for somebody to show up.
Details trickle out, and before too long we can start putting things together: Mud killed a man to protect his on-and-off girlfriend Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and he's hiding from the cops until he can scrounge together the spare parts to fix the boat and escape to Mexico with her. Neckbone responds to this out of an unfocused sense of respect for a fugitive badass, but for Ellis, this has a much more romantic element: he manages to convince himself that helping out Mud and Juniper will be contributing to a torrid, Romeo and Juliet-like situation where he's enabling a pair of tormented lovers to escape to their paradise.
For it's not really the boys' attempt to help Mud escape that drives the movie, though it's what drives the plot. Mud, for most of its running time, is about how a teenage boy who's actively trying to figure out this mystifying thing called "girls" for the first time absorbs the lessons that the grown men around him project. Meanwhile, the women in Ellis's immediate life - Juniper, his mom, and the high school girl May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant) that he's crushing on - at once both subvert and reinforce the sexist framework that the adult men are spouting off.
Mud could be rightfully accused of presenting an incredibly one-sided view of gender politics, with the women in the film being barely fleshed-out enough to qualify as two-dimensional, though this ends up having a lot to do with the film's resolute commitment to Ellis's POV. Besides, it's hardly the case that the film is terribly interested in digging into any character, besides Ellis himself and the projection of ideal manhood he ascribes to Mud. This is a largely symbolic film, not at all a realistic one, and this is a mode that writer-director Jeff Nichols does a fantastic job of exploring, even though it gets to be annoyingly schematic how each and ever adult male in the film ends up having the Statement of Beliefs that sits wrong with Ellis somehow, until his mother gets here own Female-Based Counter-Argument that doesn't necessarily sit any better, but at least manages to shock him out of the self-deluding frame that he's been clinging to for an entire feature, and presumably, an entire childhood.
There's a whole lot of early David Gordon Green in the film's slow-moving, minor-key exploration of place: Nichols and cinematographer Adam Stone do a better job than any filmmakers have since at least Green's own Undertow in using the sticky, sunblasted and plant-filled landscapes of the American South as a visual expression of character, and the absolutely gorgeous exterior cinematography crafts a romantic overlay for battered, impoverished settings that exactly matches Ellis's own half-awareness of the shortcomings of the adult worldview he's trying to adopt. It's a film to evoke the heat of summer, though it fantastically depicts the humidity, an all-encompassing dampness that saturates every location and character and suggest the omnipresence of rot.
There's a hell of a character piece that the film has going, then, with uniformly great performances (Sheridan and Shepard are the best), though the women in the cast get very little to do (I can't explain Witherspoon's presence in a nothing role, except by recourse to the idea that her career is on the skids and she needed to work with a respectable indie director). But the problem with it, is it's not able to head to anything concrete; the film is depicting a mental process, not a narrative one. So, at a certain point, Nichols has to fully commit to the "Mud is a fugitive" subplot, sending the film into a disjointed and trite series of climactic scenes that have as their best justification a really swell Joe Don Baker cameo. But even that isn't nearly enough to excuse how junky and broad the film abruptly turns, and how much it trivialises the conceptual, psychologically abstract opening and middle by putting Ells on the back burner and trotting out a gun battle that fits with the rest of the movie not remotely, and ends in a deeply cloying final scene.
It's such a disaster of a final act that it makes it hard to say if Mud ever actually knew what it was on about, or if the delicate sketch of an adolescent boy trying to fix his sense of sexual identity was just an accident. Certainly, it means that one leaves Mud with the very worst parts freshest in memory, and that's not something that any movie should ever do. For a long time, I was convinced that I loved the movie, and in the final crush, I didn't even like it; a huge drop but a decisive one, and it's hard to decide whether the fact that most of the movie is truly strong actually ends up mattering very much.
7/10
Every single person I've asked about this movie said they were really enjoying this until that WTFAWFUL, no-good, very bad ending. I kinda want to see it even more, lol
ReplyDeleteIf you ask me Mud could have taken that time at the end and used it at the beginning to give more depth to its exposition. Also, it would have paid to give more reality to the building of the boat, to the collecting of the tools and parts, all the earthy activities that good hometown boys experience, as opposed to the routine hope for love in 21st century society. Love is (among other things) the ability for a detailed experience, but as this movie proves, no one knows how to love since they would only get bored halfway through such detail. As most all movies of "today" things happen way too fast; balancing characters against story, needing the story to prove itself as impetus before the contemporary viewer falls asleep, or calls it "weird". You are right about the very ending, and it doesn't make sense; sense enough for a viewer to imagine its plausibility. It seems to be just a ploy to brighten the spirits. Perhaps it could have worked better without that last Michael Shannon scene under water (Trying not to spoil anything here).
ReplyDeleteI was told by many people this movie was awesome, and I learned something. Not everyone has the same context for "awesome" as I do. I should have learned this a long time ago when I went to see the Avengers. For me Mud was a regular movie, perhaps Indie with Hollywood sensibilities. I'm not even going to discuss Avengers.
I do however try to learn from every movie I see. I was thinking on the movie Blue Valentine while watching it (the cinematography along with the theme of love reminded me so) and I thought on how Blue Valentine was more effective because it incorporated, interestingly enough, the element of time. juxtaposing past with present to create an experience for the viewer who was then forced to think and then feel upon their thought (at least for me). It didn't have as keen a Hollywood sense as Mud, but it worked well in giving the characters depth without "dragging". Not to say that I care whether it drags or not. I just want a good story tellin'. Mud was incredibly slack in its use of time. Seemingly choosing its cuts just to speed things up.
(Spoiler Alert): I guess, however, I will say the most brilliant part in the movie is the way it showed Mud (Matthew McConaughey) running out of cigarettes. I remember thinking at the beginning: where is he getting all these cigarettes, he is starving and yet, he has a bunch of cigs. But it turned out (if I recall correctly) he just doesn't smoke any more about two-thirds into the movie. I enjoyed how I was lead to think about this, and imagine, as the writer, or director, being aware of this tiny detail during its filming or editing. And finally, this reminds me of another interesting part: the bounty hunters. They drop out of the movie at one point, then show up suddenly at the end. But rightly so, since, from the moment they dropped out I kept wondering why they hadn't tailed Ellis, visiting the hotel so many times.
I wanted to point out that there is another level of love going here, not just the exploration of male/female relationships. And to me, it's maybe more central than those - it's the bonds beyond parents and children. The two chastisement scenes - first Tom and Mud and then with Ellis and his father are telling, as is the fact that Ellis's father finds it in himself to express his love for Ellis by voicing it - not easy to do for someone as taciturn as that. Neckbone's uncle has several scenes where it's clear that he loves Neckbone as a son.
ReplyDeleteThis doesn't really change the male dominated aspect of the film, but to me it's an important dynamic going on and the one that holds up - while Mud, Senior, Ellis and even Tom suffer extreme disappointments in their love life they still have each other to lean on.
I love the scene when May Pearl tells Ellis "You're only 14". I'm sure Ellis was thinking 'What does that have to do with anything' and in this case I agree with him.