Mud
There's a place where the river opens up into the whole wide world. When you reach it, the horizon expands to infinity, and everything ahead looks impossibly big and uncharted. Jeff Nichols' "Mud," a Mississippi River coming-of-age story, takes place on that threshold, down in the delta where innocence and experience, the past and the future, all run together like dirt and water.
"Mud" runs deep with undercurrents from American movies and literature: "Tom Sawyer," "Huckleberry Finn," "The Night of the Hunter," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Moby Dick," "Cool Hand Luke," the films of Nichols' fellow Austin-resident Terrence Malick ("Badlands," "Days of Heaven," "The Tree of Life"). But the picture never comes unmoored from reality or drifts off into lazy abstraction and cliché. Nichols' eye for particulars, his feel for the characters and landscapes (and waterscapes), is so vivid you feel you could get bit by a mosquito or a water moccasin if you're not careful.
Adam Stone's luminous widescreen photography and David Wingo's acoustic swamp music also have a lot to do with that, and so does the casting. McConaughey is on a roll, and this part, which Nichols wrote for him, is the strongest and most subtle lead performance of his career.(Could this be what becomes of Wooderson after he stops messing around with high school girls?) Even better, if that's possible, is young Sheridan (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain's youngest son in "The Tree of Life"), whose first kiss with a slightly older girl (two grades?) at a beach bonfire is so flawlessly rendered it already feels like it came from a classic movie.
American icon Sam Shepard, another Malick veteran, appears as a houseboat hermit sporting Billy Bob Thornton's haircut from "Sling Blade." Michael Shannon, the magnetic star of Nichols' previous pictures, effortlessly steals scenes as Neck's slacker-diver uncle. (A detail: When we meet Neck he's wearing a faded hand-me-down Fugazi T-shirt that suggests he must live with an older brother or male relative. The moment we see the inside of Uncle Galen's trailer, we have a pretty good idea of where it came from.) And while Ellis looks like a cross between Atticus Finch's kids Scout and Jem (Mary Badham and Phillip Alford) in Robert Mulligan's "To Kill a Mockingbird," Neckbone is the perfect fusion of River Phoenix and Jerry O'Connell in "Stand by Me". The resonances are all around.
The boy, Tye Sheridan, is mesmerizing. This is really the story of how a teenager, driven by compulsion, puts in time to discover the complex truths and myths about a woman's love.
Mud is a very fine film about innocence, father figures and love, a work that manages to be thrilling, unsentimental and emotionally rewarding. This is, sadly, an all too rare combination in so many films, particularly the other American ones that showed in this year's Cannes competition, making Mud all the more worth the wait.
Mud is a very fine film about innocence, father figures and love, a work that manages to be thrilling, unsentimental and emotionally rewarding. This is, sadly, an all too rare combination in so many films, particularly the other American ones that showed in this year's Cannes competition, making Mud all the more worth the wait.
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