Mudbound film review: ‘sense of hope’
Dee Rees’ Mudbound is a film that feels like it has been around for a long time. It’s crafted with the same kind of scale and precision of the greatest epics of film history. Unlike filmmakers of the past though, Rees has no need to sugarcoat stories of the past, and her tapestry on the postwar American South is nothing if not brutal in its condemnation of traditional white nationalism.
The film focuses on two families, the white McAllans, who own a sizeable stretch of farm land in Mississippi but have no idea how to care for it, and the black Jacksons, who have worked the land as tenants for decades with the dream of one day owning it themselves... Already existing tensions grow to a boiling point when one member of each family returns from World War II, and becomes friends with the other.
The film is direct, blunt, and clear in its messages, both stylistic and literal. The camera highlights shades of grey and brown over less common oranges and blues to convey a sense of desolation in this land and on the front lines of the war, but never loses the invasive sense of hope for the future.
The most important topic for Rees to handle in this film, above the discussion of the nature of violence, faith, colonialism, family, and everything else the film is about, is racism in America. She does this excellently. Rees knows this isn’t the first story of this kind that’s been told, so she doesn’t tell it the same way. She knows the audience already has a basic understanding of the segregation and commonplace discrimination of this time period, and knows that rather than showing a long stretch of text or a speech at the beginning of the movie to explain this she can simply show us a conversation, or a quick act of prejudice that brings us back to the 1940s in a heartbeat. Rees also uses the perspective of her protagonists quite unconventionally.Though the film shifts between narrators often, the first instance of narration is from one of the McAllan’s, and the first act of the film it seems to favor that family. However, as the plot unfolds and thickens, the film focuses more and more on the Jacksons, until the movie ends with the words of a member of this family. I was, at first, off put by the decision to partially tell a story about racism through the eyes of white people realizing that people of color are, in fact, people. It’s an approach I usually feel we are ready to move past as storytellers, but as the film sunk its teeth into me I realized that the purpose of this method is that Rees does not agree. The only bit of narrative hand holding in use in this picture comes with the (probably accurate) accusation that it is necessary for an audience that has not entirely moved past the emotional shortcomings of those presented in the movie. It is then taken away as we are dropped into a warmly stark, humongous narrative about race and land in America.
