OVP: Mudbound (2017)

Film: Mudbound (2017)
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige, Jonathan Banks, Rob Morgan
Director: Dee Rees
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress-Mary J. Blige, Original Song-"Mighty River," Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

For my Thanksgiving movie extravaganza (I planned on seeing nearly a dozen movies over the five day period), I started with a trip into Netflix's biggest prestige drama-to-date.  While Netflix has cornered the market on television awards, with hit series like House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and Stranger Things being trophy magnets, they've largely missed out on nominations from its movie side, except when it comes to the Best Documentary Oscar.  Mudbound was the platform's first real play at nominations in the big leagues, though.  Based on the novel by Hillary Jordan, the film chronicles two families (one white, one black) in Mississippi before, during, and after World War II.  The movie has an all-star cast, and comes from Dee Rees, whose movie Pariah put her on the map as a filmmaker to watch.  Unfortunately, Mudbound falls into some of the worst of Netflix's tendencies toward too many ideas, too little cohesion, and can't seem to find enough to say about its plethora of characters onscreen.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie's central problem, in my opinion, is that it never really translates well-enough from the book.  I haven't read Hillary Jordan's novel, but I've seen enough adaptations to understand a translation problem when I see one.  The movie, to begin with, has too many characters.  You see up-top that Carey Mulligan (who plays Laura) is the top-billed star of the film, and this isn't entirely because she's the most famous actor in the movie-she's also probably in the most scenes.  Yet her narrative gets lost as the picture continues.  It feels like so much of the story is centered around her as a means-to-an-end, getting Laura's brother-in-law Jamie (Hedlund) to eventually meet Ronsel (Mitchell), the actual central protagonists.  The problem with this is that Laura's narrative is interesting, and yet we just sort of leave her hanging unless it's in service to one of these two men late in the film.  There's a jarring moment in the picture where the wife of a field hand whom Laura's husband Henry (Clarke) fired comes to the house, saying that she's going to kill her husband for raping their daughters.  It's the sort of deeply heavy, harrowing plot that is thick in the movie, but we never really go beyond that with Laura-this scene happens, the woman ends up killing her husband because Laura refuses to take her to town as a distraction, but we don't get any sense of what's going on underneath Laura's facade.  This might be a little bit on Mulligan, but it's more on the writers, who don't give her anything to do once Jamie and Ronsel come home except to fall into lust with her brother-in-law.

The movie has a lot of ideas, which is probably why it made a compelling novel, but they aren't picked apart or parceled through enough, just presented as "this is what happened" without cohesion to a larger theme.  Mary J. Blige as Florence, Ronsel's mother, is getting the lion's share of the praise for the film, but this is shocking to me in part because it's not particularly special work, and also because it's a really small part that's not particularly consequential to the film in the end.  Blige's Florence is a fascinating look at a woman who is forced to take care of a white woman's children, despite not wanting to do so like her mother did, almost completely because of the economic and societal requirements that are heaped on her as a black woman that aren't also brought upon Laura.  This would have been an interesting story, but we also have to find time for Ronsel and Jamie's ill-fated friendship, Henry's latent racism and his father's (Banks, who is so hammy you expect your computer to start shooting out bacon) cruel prejudice, and of course the frequent shots of the sepia-soaked fields of Mississippi (filmed with care by Rachel Morrison, but also as if Netflix was trying to prove that nothing is lost by viewing such outdoor shots on your computer screen...but it is, as the scenes are too small to capture the light in the way a big-screen would have, and has a boring sameness that makes me hope this isn't the way Morrison gets her first Oscar nomination after years of more interesting work).

The best performance in the film, and the only one in my opinion that distinguishes itself in this jumble of a screenplay, is Hedlund's.  As a charming, sexy, but damaged former soldier with a progressive streak (certainly compared to the rest of his family), he finds a center at his character that lasts beyond the screenplay, and he has enough attention from the plot to actually stick his arch.  I loved the way that his motives with his sister-in-law remain more of a mystery than his clear admiration for Ronsel (it makes her obvious love of him all the more fascinating-what if she loves the brother who doesn't truly want her?), and Hedlund is able to parlay his absurd handsomeness to his advantage, creating a live-wire dynamic that keeps the film's predictable (is abbreviated) story beats from becoming too plodding.

Honestly, that's about all I have to say about the film.  It always feels weird to rag on a movie with such a heavy (and sadly, deeply relevant) topic, but it's just not a very well-constructed or interesting picture.  If this is what Netflix offers to aspiring narrative filmmakers, I have to say I'm not looking forward to them gaining the same sort of foothold in film as they have in television.