Dee Rees (2017)
This formally ambitious racial drama, shown at the London Film Festival, is based on the 2008 debut novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan. I didn’t know beforehand that Mudbound was adapted from a novel but it doesn’t take long to guess – especially since the film, unusually, has no less than six narrative voice(over)s. The unappealing title is the name of a flood-prone cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s. Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) buys the land and relocates there from Memphis with his city-born wife Laura (Carey Mulligan), who’s reluctant to move, their two young daughters and Henry’s malignantly crabby father (Jonathan Banks). Henry intends that the family will live in the neighbouring town of Marietta, from where he’ll drive to work on the farm each day. When he discovers that the owner of the house he’s paid to rent in Marietta has cheated him by selling the property to another man, the McAllans have no option but to move into the cramped, primitive farmhouse. Their humble living conditions give them more in common than they would otherwise have with the sharecroppers on their land: the Atwoods (Dylan Arnold and Lucy Faust), a young white couple; and the African-American Jackson family – Hap (Rob Morgan), his wife Florence (Mary J Blige) and their several children. Another thing the McAllans and the Jacksons have in common is that one of their number is fighting in Europe in World War II – the Jacksons’ eldest son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), Henry’s younger brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund).
In the opening scene of Mudbound, Henry and Jamie are attempting, in urgent haste because a storm is imminent, to dig a grave for their father. After this prologue, the story moves back to 1939, when Laura and Henry first meet, and from there through the war years and the early post-war period, up to the point at which the story began. A short epilogue completes the picture. I’m guessing that the narrators of Hillary Jordan’s novel describe not just their feelings but also the events of the plot. In the film, these multiple voices – of Laura, Henry, Hap, Florence, Ronsel and Jamie – aren’t needed to tell the story: Dee Rees and Virgil Williams, who shares the screenplay credit with her, are doing that, from an essentially objective point of view. Online summaries of the book suggest that the six characters, each in their different way, are prevented, in the time and place in which Mudbound is set, from expressing themselves. While this is also true of the characters on screen, a filmmaker has other means – chiefly her actors’ faces– to get that message across. The voiceovers occasionally supply significant information – for example, that Laura, when she first met Henry, was a thirty-one-year-old virgin and agreed to marry him largely out of gratitude for rescuing her from an old-maid future. The actors’ voices on the soundtrack sometimes enrich the characterisations that the camera is recording. For the most part, though, the multiple narrators are little more than a complicating decoration. Perhaps they also contribute to Mudbound’s unfocused and episodic quality during its first half (where the different voices seem to be heard more often than they are later on). Although there’s much of interest in the opening hour of the film, it doesn’t begin to gather momentum until Ronsel and Jamie return to their families after the war has ended.
The film’s main strength comes from melding two familiar types of story and yielding something distinctive from their combination: a tale of demobbed men struggling to acclimatise post-war is grafted onto a Jim Crow country melodrama. The sequences describing Ronsel’s and Jamie’s wartime experiences aren’t imaginative but their legacy is potently realised. Jamie’s experiences as a fighter pilot have traumatised him. Ronsel has discovered that the racial segregation he’s used to at home doesn’t apply on the front line; he has also had a love affair with Resl (Samantha Hoefer), a white German girl. Dee Rees does a particularly good job of describing the less blatantly offensive aspects of American racist conventions of the time – for example, the way that Laura, although kindly disposed towards the Jacksons, speaks to Florence with a natural condescension. The same is true of Jamie’s attitude towards Ronsel, at least in the early stages of their curious friendship. Rees also makes clear that working the Mudbound land is unrewarding for all concerned, regardless of race or economic circumstance. A subplot concerning the ill-fated Atwoods is the starkest illustration of this. Middle-class Laura’s politely aloof attitude towards white-trash Vera Atwood, until their last, shocking encounter, is another well-observed social detail.
The central horror story is that of Ronsel, a young man whose life seems in greater peril in peacetime Mississippi than it was in wartime Europe. The film’s atmosphere is increasingly ominous – you know, of course, that things are heading for a grim climax. Tamar-Kali’s score is an insistent reminder. Besides, the geography of the piece primes you for a Southern Gothic explosion. You naturally wonder how it’s come about that the McAllan sons are preparing to bury their father, especially once it’s clear (as it is almost immediately) that he’s a vile racist. The big finish is hardly unexpected: Pappy, when he chances on evidence that Ronsel has fathered Resl’s child, gets together a lynch mob, including Klansmen, who torture Ronsel. Jamie, in punishment for befriending the latter, is forced to choose which part of Ronsel’s body should be removed – eyes, tongue or genitals. An earlier conversation between Jamie and Pappy, in which the father belittled his son’s military medals because Jamie had ‘never looked a man between the eyes’ before killing him, reeks of significance-to-come: Jamie, once released by the posse, looks his father in the eyes before murdering him. The predictability of all this doesn’t, however, make the torture sequence any less shocking – or stop you inwardly cheering the patricide.
Except for Pappy, the main white characters are more complex than the black ones, whose virtues are more or less unqualified. I can only speculate as to why this is. The novelist Hillary Jordan is white and, I assume, a liberal. Dee Rees is African-American but it’s clear enough (and the lyrics of a song played over the closing credits seem to confirm) that she means Mudbound, in spite of its historical setting, to reflect depressing aspects of race relations in America seventy years later. Making the Jacksons morally ambiguous might get in the way of the political view Rees wants to convey. Florence Jackson is a thoroughly admirable wife and mother, from whose nursing and housekeeping skills the McAllans benefit. Hap is a thoroughly admirable husband and father, and a preacher well respected in the local black community. We sometimes see in Hap’s eyes that it sticks in his craw to obey his white bosses but he knows co-operation is in his family’s best interests. The Jackson children want to better themselves and their parents encourage this but Ronsel, when he returns to Mississippi, feels a duty to help his parents, especially with Hap still recovering from a serious leg injury.
The Jacksons’ marital fidelity contrasts with the compromised relationship of Laura and Henry, and the longstanding mutual attraction between Laura and Jamie. As indicated above, Laura admits the expediency of her agreeing to wed Henry. One of the most emotionally rich scenes in the film comes before they marry, when Laura and the McAllan brothers go to a dance in Memphis. Laura has just met Jamie for the first time and the spark between them is especially evident when they take the floor. Henry perceives it but watches with an almost gratified calm: he knows the effect his brother has on women. Jamie’s increasing alcohol dependency is familiar enough for a young man in his psychologically snarled-up situation but he’s far from a standard hopeless drunk. He does constructive things – whether it’s getting to know Ronsel or putting together a shower that allows Laura to stay clean in greater privacy than she did before. That Jamie does these things with a degree of self-interest makes him all the more convincing a character.
Mudbound is strongly acted. Jason Mitchell builds a powerful sense of Ronsel’s feelings of furious suffocation back home after the war. As his father, Rob Morgan tends to read his lines deliberately but gives perhaps the most physically eloquent performance in the film – along with Mary J Blige’s sensitive, capable Florence. Dee Rees makes effective use of Carey Mulligan’s ability to switch imperceptibly between looking plain and beautiful. Because Mulligan is so incisive and, in her understated way, magnetic, it’s somewhat frustrating that Laura seems to recede from the centre of the story. Jason Clarke is nuanced in the first part of the film: it’s not his fault that the script narrows the personality of Henry once the family settles on the farm. (Contrast the look he gives his brother and his wife-to-be at the dance with the standard jealous husband shot of Henry watching Laura watching Jamie later on.) Garrett Hedlund, excellent as usual, captures Jamie’s mixture of charm and cynicism. A quibble: given how young Laura’s children are when America enters the war in December 1941, I was surprised that they excitedly recognise Jamie when he returns four years later.
Although the film’s name predicts the prevailing colour scheme, the cinematographer Rachel Morrison gets more tonal variety from the landscape than might be expected. The postscript sees Ronsel Jackson returning to Resl in Germany and meeting their young son for the first time. While it’s a great relief that Ronsel survives his ordeal at the hands of the white racists, the price he has paid is too neatly symbolic: it was his tongue that the torturers removed. This is another element of the story that may work better in the book than it does on film. On the printed page, we can easily accept the continuation of a narrative voice that can no longer actually speak (and feel the impact of this). On screen, it seems wrong – a cheat – that we still hear Ronsel’s voiceover on the soundtrack, commenting on this last sequence. Mudbound is narratively awkward. It isn’t the expansive drama that its themes (and length – 135 minutes) might suggest. All in all, though, it’s a very decent film.
6 October 2017
