“Violence is part and parcel of country life. You’re forever being assailed by dead things. Dead mice, dead rabbits, dead possums. You find them rotting in the yard, you smell them under the house.”
 |
| Photo Credit: Mudbound/IMDb |
That quote, from Mudbound’s Laura McAllan, a college-educated woman “saved” from being an old maid by her engineer-turned-failing-farmer husband, illustrates the film’s attitude toward a lot of what life was like in the 1940s in the deep South. Laura, played by Carey Mulligan, is an astute observer of many things. She is able to see through the posturing of her husband, Henry (Jason Clarke), a man not wracked by insecurities so much as by mediocrity, and through the wrongness of white supremacy in rural Mississippi in the time during and after World War II.
But just because you can see problems doesn’t mean you do anything about them.
That’s what makes Mudbound, co-writer-director Dee Rees’s third film, so beguiling. Its white characters more often than not recognize that there are wrongs committed by their culture, but adopting the attitude of, “It’s not my fault,” allows them to justify their own forms of cruelty and inaction. The movie’s white characters are frozen, not by fear and perhaps not even by inaccurate delusions of their own superiority, but by the simple inertia of “that’s how things are.” This allows them to shift blame, to avoid responsibility, and look away from everything to serve their own selfish interests.
The Jacksons, the black sharecropper family that works the McAllans’ land, carry themselves as though they’re finished with worrying about “how things are,” for they have big dreams. The family’s father, Hap (Rob Morgan), has his eye on the prize: owning his own land, the money for which he is always this close to obtaining. This fuels him as he puts up with the indignities, absurd requests, and the general outlandishness of working for Henry, a man who has no idea what he’s doing.
Hap’s wife, Florence (Mary J. Blige), goes to work for Laura and the McAllans’ children because of how much support Laura needs—support that Florence is never afforded. She speaks in voiceover about the reasons she and her husband have for putting up with so many others’ garbage. It doesn’t boil down to pride or proving themselves, but rather love for their children, who deserve better than they had. But her situation means that her love must be divided. “I didn’t have the luxury of loving only my own children,” she says while she tends to her obligation of caring for Laura and Henry’s daughters. But, of course, love isn’t the only thing that drives her. Fear is a big part of it. Fear of punishment for saying the “wrong” thing, upsetting an already unequal balance, and creating violent chaos from what is an obscene and indecent version of order.
When Attempts To Break Unjust Cycles Don’t Go Far Enough
But even when you can diagnose a problem and take care to right a wrong, you can’t get it right. You spite the system and the system bites back. And all it leaves you with is standing, dumbfounded, unable to muster words of comfort in a half-built church, its open and incomplete roof a painful reminder of a house of God that can’t undo the wrongs of society.
Mudbound has two characters whose mere existence represents the start of a break from their culture’s unhealthy patterns. They connect on a level their family members wouldn’t understand. Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), Henry’s brother, and Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), the eldest son of the Jackson family, both fought for their country in World War II. Jamie was a bomber pilot and Ronsel was a tank commander. They had similar experiences in the war, and each felt the warm blood of their friends and comrades stain their faces and their clothes. Neither deserved to survive anymore than their friends who were slain, but they made it home thanks to the lottery of fate and a pinch of dumb luck thrown in. Knowing this, as each man does deep in his bones, is enough to drive a man to insanity—or at least to the bottle, which is what they both do when they arrive stateside and the “safety” of a harsh agrarian lifestyle (and even harsher racial relationships) at home.
But here’s the thing: Finding a drinking buddy and sharing PTSD are by themselves not enough to change the world. Jamie and Ronsel’s bond is a positive start and it shows to those around them that, if you approach another person in good faith, any b.s. thoughts about superiority melt away. But when presented with new information, those already stuck in their mindset are not keen on changing their position. In fact, they spit the new information back and retreat to their original position with a renewed ferocity stronger than any they had previously held.
That does not mean you shouldn’t continue to approach those who are different from you with openness. In fact, you need to do it. But remaining aware of the boomerang effect, and the way that it causes others to shut down when their worldview is challenged, is also key.
That awareness comes with age and experience, and it allows for people to steal moments of happiness from the jaws of exhaustion, depression, grief, and anxiety. Rees shows this when Hap and Florence sip coffee late at night so they can have a moment to dance together, and when Jamie and Ronsel sip from a bottle of cheap liquor in a pickup truck while the MLB All-Star Game plays on the radio—featuring the triumphant return of the players who, like them, recently returned from the front lines of the war.
Those who are too insecure to accept that other people are, in fact, people, will always set out to ruin those moments of happiness, to make them as fleeting as possible. But you should sneak those moments anyway.
Director: Dee Rees
Writers: Virgil Williams, Dee Rees
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, Jonathan Banks, Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan
Rating: 4/5 stars
Available now on Netflix and in limited release
No comments:
Post a Comment