Review: Mud (2012)
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland
Director: Jeff Nichols
Country: USA
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: Mud opened in limited release on April 26th, 2013. For an additional perspective on Mud, please read Mel’s review.
Mud (2012) is about love. It’s not a romance or what would pejoratively be called a ‘chick flick’, it is about love. Love found, love lost, love misunderstood, adolescent love, parental love, marital love, devotional love. All of these kinds of love are explored in Jeff Nichols’ latest film, and this puts it in direct juxtaposition to his debut feature, the stunning Shotgun Stories (2007) which is arguably about hate, expressed through the violence of a splintered family.
Love found, love lost, love misunderstood, adolescent love, parental love, marital love, devotional love. All of these kinds of love are explored in Jeff Nichols’ latest film…
The story is that of Ellis (newcomer Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland, also a first-time actor) and their discovery of a boat that has been stuck in a tree on an Arkansas river island by the most recent hurricane. They want to claim the boat as theirs, but discover a man living in it. The man is Mud (Matthew McConaughey) and he says he’ll give them the boat in exchange for some food. He’s just on the island waiting for someone and when he meets up with this person, he’ll move on. We find he’s waiting for Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), his one true love. He’s hiding on the island because he’s killed a man who had abused Juniper and he’s on the lamb.
Ellis is drawn to Mud because of the mystery surrounding him. Mud tells the boys that they remind him of himself when he was their age (which is 14). Ellis is convinced that Mud is a good man and he wants to help him, at first against Neckbone’s urgings…but he comes around later.
When Ellis is told that his parents may be divorcing and his whole way of life on the river will be changing because of a law requiring people to move off the riverbank if the owner (Ellis’ mother, Mary Lee played by Sarah Paulson) leaves, this pushes Ellis closer to Mud and his tale of undying love for Juniper. Mud says he’s loved Juniper since he was about Ellis’ age or a little younger and this idea of steadfast love in the face of his parent’s dissolving marriage is a beacon of hope for the young man. He wants to believe that love conquers all and in Mud he sees that.
The danger Mud is in is not only from the police, but from bounty hunters hired by the father of the man he killed whose name is King (Joe Don Baker). They’ve staked out Juniper’s motel and are omnipresent in the town; they even have a man working for them in the Sheriff’s department. King’s reach is long, but Mud is just out of range out there on that island.
When Juniper does not meet Ellis and Neck at the arranged time for them to take her to Mud, they ask around and find her in a bar being chatted up by another man and she all too willing to be chatted up. Ellis starts to believe what Mud’s old friend (and Ellis’ across-the-river neighbor) Tom Blankenship (Sam Shepard) told him about Juniper and Mud. He said that she’s willing to bed down with the worst of men and when she gets into trouble she calls Mud to get her out. He blindly stumbles in and beats the man near to death and gets her out of whatever situation she’s in. The last time, the shot the guy and maybe Juniper knew he’d kill him. Maybe that’s what she wanted and led him to it. Tom says she doesn’t love him, but he sure loves her.
Ellis’ faith in love is nearly shattered when two things happen. One is when his crush (whom in the middle of all of this going on with Mud he manages to score a date with and whom he believes he is in love with) breaks his heart and the second is when Mud breaks up with Juniper through a note Ellis delivers to Juniper. It is restored when Mud risks his own life to save his twice in the same day under different circumstances best left to the film and not to me.
With Mud, Nichols reaffirms what we were already starting to know with Shotgun Stories and his second film Take Shelter (2011). He is a spectacular storyteller with the ability to make an audience become deeply invested in characters they never really get to know.
With Mud, Nichols reaffirms what we were already starting to know with Shotgun Stories and his second film Take Shelter (2011). He is a spectacular storyteller with the ability to make an audience become deeply invested in characters they never really get to know. He gives us only enough information about his characters to let us feel like we are acquaintances with them, but not close friends. Despite our distance from the characters, we are connected to all of them because Nichols manages to make us see a part of ourselves in each of them. We are rooted in these characters, for good or ill, and we are in it to the end with them. Mud shows us a child’s world, perfect and innocent, that is starting to be tainted by the real world. The harsh realities of life are finding Ellis and Neckbone and are wresting them from their warm beds of childhood. We care about them because we remember what this was like for ourselves. We want love to conquer all because we remember a time when we thought it could.
Nichols fashions a tale that is very much akin to a Spielberg film of the ‘80s (both that he directed himself or produced) but without the monster, alien or fantastical adventure. He takes the heart of those teenaged heroes and puts it into a real-life situation with real-life consequences. Ellis and Neckbone aren’t Elliot and his friends nor are they The Goonies, but they have a lot in common with them. Nichols gives us the clear-eyed innocence that we see in those films and grounds it in reality, making the stakes of their decisions high and the outcomes painful but in a way that will help them grow into good men. The believe in the hope of love and what it can bring to them as they mature and Mud helps them to hold on to that hope. He brings it to their doorsteps and lets them believe that with love, a man has a reason to live.
Nichols creates this tale with a sure hand and an agile eye, soaking in the detail of the Arkansas river and its people. He gives us people that are not the stereotypes we are used to seeing in a film about Arkansas, these boys and their families are not rednecks, they are people trying to live their lives as best they can. Ellis is the everyman, or every-child, in all of us still looking to love to guide us and see us home.
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