Mud
Jeff Nichols (2012)
Take Shelter had a fascinating idea but Jeff Nichols painted himself into a corner in the matter of how to resolve the story. Although Mud is another original screenplay by Nichols, its plotting and themes are more conventional, in some ways almost cliched. The geography and the teenage boys’ adventure aspect naturally bring to mind Mark Twain. At the centre of Mud is the friendship between the two kids – Ellis and Neckbone (Neck for short) – and a charismatic stranger who’s wanted by the law: this suggests Great Expectations and Whistle Down the Wind (and, to other viewers, no doubt, other books and films) – and risks making the movie feel secondhand. This time, however, Nichols extricates himself successfully from the inherent difficulties of the material. Qualities that Take Shelter and Mud have in common are the convincing, sometimes complex characters and Nichols’ excellent direction of the actors. He’s tenacious in Mud in going deeper into these characters and enabling the actors to bring out the truth of them and to make the story credible and sometimes moving. Nichols is an organised, thrifty writer. There are details which, although they’re not planted emphatically, you take in early in the film – poisonous snakes, a character’s abilities as a sharpshooter – and which will matter later on. And because these elements, when they return, occur in a dramatically and emotionally charged context, the payoff doesn’t seem merely predictable and convenient. Early on in Mud, Neck’s eccentric uncle Galen explains to the boys the lyric of the Beach Boys’ ‘Help Me, Rhonda’, which has been playing on the radio. Approaching the end of the film, I was hoping Nichols would use the song (which I like anyway) for the closing credits because it had, as the movie built, become so apt. He does.
Nichols achieves various resonances in the course of Mud (which, at 130 minutes, is a bit too long: it dips in the middle before reaching its exciting climax). There’s at least one instance where something that rings false at first rings true eventually. The events of the story are seen so much from the points of view of Ellis and Neck that it feels like a mistake the first time there’s a scene without them. That scene features instead the eponymous Mud, a fugitive who hangs out on a small island in the Arkansas River, and Tom Blankenship, an older man who’s known Mud throughout the latter’s troubled life. Nichols has to resort to this in order to get across information that he can’t convey within the narrative structure used up to this point. The closing scene, in which Mud and Tom appear together, has a quality of healing: it contrasts effectively with the earlier angry exchange between them – and makes their first scene seem right in retrospect. There’s also an instance of a resonance being achieved instantly. In the middle of a conversation with Mud and Neck, Ellis looks up at birds in the sky. I’m not sure how Nichols does this but he makes you feel this is an image that will always stick in the boy’s mind. (You know this from your own experience – certain things lodge in the memory even though you can’t explain why: they weren’t unique and didn’t happen at a time that dictated they’d be unforgettable.) Within the plot of Mud, these birds foreshadow the nightingale tattoo on the hand of Mud’s ex-girlfriend, Juniper, whom he’s desperate to get back with. He tells Ellis and Neck about the tattoo and it’s a powerful moment when the boys see it on the hand of a woman in a supermarket.
You believe increasingly in Ellis’s determination to do what he sees as the right thing. He’s attracted to May Pearl, a girl several years his senior and feels strongly enough to fight over her with an older boy. (The black eye Ellis gets as a result is useful for the plot later on but you nevertheless accept his fearlessness in taking on the other boy.) Ellis is convinced that May Pearl will like him back: it’s the combined strength and implausibility of this conviction that makes it credible – it’s rooted in character (it doesn’t make sense but Ellis insists that it must be so). In comparison, the difficulties in Ellis’s home life – his reasons for needing a life outside it and to believe, because of his parents’ failing marriage, in couples who love each other – are a bit contrived. The eventual physical removal from the Arkansas River of the houseboat on which the family has lived is too neatly symbolic (although it has real emotional impact). Nichols uses the landscape superbly. The film realises the different possibilities of water – its offer of freedom, its claggy and imprisoning potential, its subaquatic secrets; the emptiness of the urban landscape that we see from time to time is expressive too. Nichols and his DoP Adam Stone have achieved some fine lighting effects. I especially liked a scene in which Ellis’s father, Senior, admits his sense of failure to his son and the camera picks out Senior’s eyes, bright with shame, in the darkness. (As Senior learns to accept the end of his marriage, he seems gradually to come into the light even though the film’s ending is hardly a happy one.)
It takes time to adjust to the level of the voices – and those of Ellis and, particularly, Neck continue to be furry. Ellis is played by Tye Sheridan, whom I barely remembered from The Tree of Life. He has an odd moment early on here when, breathing heavily, he seems to be acting artificially but Nichols directs him skilfully. Sheridan is quiet – possibly sometimes too quiet – but this really pays off when Ellis bursts into tears and anger. Jacob Lofland’s Neck is contrasted obviously with Ellis at the start – using swear words to demonstrate his independence and holding on to them desperately when he gets scared: circumstances cause Neck to grow up in the course of the movie but not in a decisive, summer-I-became-a-man way. Matthew McConaughey’s work in 2012 has transformed his standing, with critics anyway. I can barely think of anything he did before last year, except for A Time To Kill (which seems to be on television regularly). I parted company with Magic Mike halfway through and haven’t seen Bernie or Killer Joe. I thought McConaughey was good in the early part of The Paperboy but Mud is the first time that he’s really registered with me. There’s the occasional moment when he seems locked into intensity but he’s often excellent – for example, in registering Mud’s shock when Ellis and Neck first bring him provisions (this naturally recalls Magwitch – although Ellis and Neck are more loyal than Pip) and at the hospital with Ellis when the boy has been bitten by a snake.
In the climax to the story, Matthew McConaughey’s intensity feels true and makes sense. Mud’s feelings about Juniper are undoubtedly strong (he’s wanted for the murder of a man who made her pregnant then caused her to lose the baby) – yet there are moments when McConaughey suggests those feelings are fortified by the certainty of separation from Juniper (when the pair see each other briefly the effect is powerful). Sometimes McConaughey looks like a mythic idea of a romantic fugitive rather than a real one but this works fine because Mud is often seen through Ellis’s eyes. Reese Witherspoon’s career seems to have been on a downward trajectory ever since she won the Oscar for Walk the Line so the substance of the character and her playing of Juniper amount to something of a comeback. She’s touchingly believable when Juniper tells Ellis that she loves Mud but doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him: she’s miserable without Mud but realises that she’s not strong enough to sustain a relationship with him.
Sam Shepard, Michael Shannon and several of the actors in the smaller parts are wonderful. Shepard as Tom Blankenship is great when Ellis lets rip at him and Tom knows the charges are both true and false. Tom is lonely, and we learn why: Michael Shannon’s Galen, who scrapes a living diving for clams, expresses a different kind of loneliness, less explicit but no less communicative, as Galen dispenses kindly advice to the boys whose companionship he needs. (Jeff Nichols has a real feeling for people who are, in various ways, isolated.) Shannon gives a beautiful, witty performance – deeply refreshing because the character is so different from the ones he usually plays. Sarah Paulson and Ray McKinnon have depth as Ellis’s parents, and Bonnie Sturdivant does well as May Pearl. (When Ellis’s father remarks to his son that she has two names – ‘like your mother’, whose name is Mary Lee – it’s an affecting moment, suggesting Ellis’s literal-minded but deeply-felt desire both to find a girl he can be happy with and somehow to resurrect his parents’ marriage.) The decent score is by David Wingo. I’ve found it hard to write about Mud and to explain clearly why I rate it highly but these difficulties reinforce my belief that it’s a good film. When Ellis and Neck first arrive on the island they believe to be deserted but where Mud is hiding out, the boys find a boat lodged high in a tree. The image brings to mind Werner Herzog but Mud is a movie by an original American talent.
13 May 2013