Jeff Nichols (2016)

The legal case of Loving v Virginia resulted in a decision by the US Supreme Court that invalidated state laws prohibiting interracial marriage.   The plaintiffs were Mildred Jeter Loving, a black woman, and her white husband, Richard Perry Loving, a construction worker.  In 1958, the couple, expecting a baby and in view of the anti-miscegenation laws in force in their native Virginia, had travelled to Washington DC to marry.  On their return to Caroline County, Virginia, they were arrested, pled guilty to breaking state law and received a one-year prison sentence.  This was suspended on condition that they not return to Virginia for at least twenty-five years.  The Lovings moved to Washington, where they raised a young family.  Mildred, increasingly frustrated by their situation, wrote in 1963 to Attorney General Robert Kennedy for help.  Kennedy referred their case to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which prepared an appeal on the couple’s behalf against the Virginia judicial ruling.  While the appeal was going through the courts, the Lovings returned to live in rural Virginia and their case generated considerable publicity, including a Life magazine profile.   The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the plaintiffs’ favour in June 1967.  Richard Loving died in a road accident eight years later, Mildred in 2008.

The decision in this case was a landmark and constitutionally important but the writer-director Jeff Nichols, in bringing the Lovings’ story to the screen, is determined to avoid grandstanding and to concentrate on the personal.  (He’s helped in this enterprise by his own talents, those of his cast and crew and the couple’s unbelievably apt surname.)  Nichols’s approach is epitomised most clearly in two particular moments of Loving.  In the film’s opening sequence, Mildred (Ruth Negga) and Richard (Joel Edgerton) are together outside her family’s house.  Mildred, quietly worried, tells Richard she’s pregnant; he says that’s good; they embrace and sit silently for a few moments in the darkness; the scene ends.  Later on, the young ACLU attorney Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) asks Richard if there’s anything he’d particularly like said to the Supreme Court.  Richard replies simply, ‘Tell the judge I love my wife’.

Nichols severely rations the all-out-nasty racists in evidence.  Judge Bazile (David Jensen), who indicts the Lovings in Virginia, has a manner less repugnant than his rulings are; he’s upholding state law rather than expressing his own viciousness.  The Caroline County sheriff (Marton Csokas) is more personally offensive but this isn’t overdone.  In the same way, Richard’s and Mildred’s allies aren’t one-dimensionally supportive.  The Lovings violate the terms of their suspended sentence so that Mildred can give birth to their first child in Caroline County, under the care of Richard’s midwife mother (Sharon Blackwood).  Their original lawyer Frank Beazley (Bill Camp) keeps them out of jail by telling Judge Bazile that he erroneously advised the Lovings they could return to Virginia temporarily for the childbirth; outside the courtroom, Beazley makes exasperatedly clear to the couple they won’t get a second chance.  As she’s preparing to help deliver the baby, Richard’s mother Lola tells her son, ‘You shouldn’t have married that girl’.  ‘I thought you liked her’, he replies.  ‘I like a lot of people’, says Lola, ‘but you shouldn’t have gone done that thing’.  Mildred’s sister Garnet (Terri Abney) is also angry with Richard for, as Garnet sees it, destroying the Jeters’ happy family life.  Bernie Cohen and Phil Hirschkop (Jon Bass), the Virginia civil rights lawyer with whom he works on the case, are almost remarkably uncharismatic.   The various characterisations combine to show the individuals involved in the Lovings’ story as more than representative of the political issues that dictate events – Jeff Nichols sometimes suggests an almost baffling disjunction between the people concerned and the established rules that govern their behaviour.

While Mildred’s impatience for liberation in her personal life grows as she watches Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in August 1963 on television, her husband is irked by the politicisation of their marriage:  he’s obstinately and increasingly determined to get on with literally building a home for his wife and children in Virginia.  As a construction worker, Richard majors in bricklaying:  there are perhaps too many shots of the family house’s foundations being put in place, even if the bricks never threaten to become a Fences-style blot on the metaphorical landscape.  As usual in a Nichols film, Adam Stone is the cinematographer and adept at giving the actual landscape tonal variety.  The music by David Wingo, another Nichols regular, is well used to suggest the persistent dread underlying the Lovings’ existence. Richard, in particular, is primed for hostile invasion.  More than once, Jeff Nichols seems to be preparing for a realisation of Richard’s fears which then doesn’t materialise – leaving the viewer temporarily relieved yet still uneasy, and feeling all the more sympathetic towards the Lovings.

According to Wikipedia, Joel Edgerton has spoken of his and Ruth Negga’s efforts to ‘look, and sound, and act as close as possible to the way Richard and Mildred really were’.  In Edgerton’s case, the efforts show.  He reinforces the effect of his naturally uncompromising looks – the rough-hewn features, the adamantine jaw – by pushing continuously to convey Richard’s angry, defensive single-mindedness.  Glum, taciturn men can leave viewers uncomfortable and dissatisfied, especially if they also refrain from actions that speak louder than words.  (It was more disappointing than surprising that the Screen Actors Guild gave their Best Actor award last month to Denzel Washington for playing a character in Fences who speaks his mind ad nauseam, rather than to Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea.  The SAG result suggests that the Oscar is heading in the same direction, especially in view of other political factors strongly in play this year.)   However, I don’t think this is the reason I didn’t take to Edgerton’s Richard Loving:  it’s the lack of inwardness in the actor’s closed-off quality, rather than the character’s brooding reticence, that gets in the way.

There’s an upside to Edgerton’s interpretation:  he is certainly affecting on the rare occasions that Richard allows his vulnerability to be seen or heard.  ‘Tell the judge I love my wife’ is the emotional high point of Loving.  Even so, it’s the shy, dignified beauty of Ruth Negga’s face that is the visual centre and the poignant heart of the film.  I didn’t much like Negga in Scott Graham’s Iona but she’s very well cast here.  The fact that she too has rather little to say probably helps – and not just because Negga as an actress communicates much less through her line readings than her looks.  Mildred Loving’s quietness is strongly expressive – both of her family’s precarious situation and her awareness of, and sensitivity to, her husband’s feelings.  Mildred is evidently more intelligent, as well as more politically alert, than Richard is.

This is Jeff Nichols’s fifth feature and his first based on true-life events.  Nichols has said he felt obliged to be faithful to the facts.  Although this doesn’t seem to have unduly constrained him, there are times in Loving when you feel his low-key approach to the material is too preconceived – that Nichols is avoiding a showy, sentimental treatment more than creating a substantially different one.  On the whole, though, this is welcome:  the negative description of Loving in one of its reviews on Rotten Tomatoes as ‘frustratingly subtle’ says more about standard audience expectations than the critic concerned may have intended.  It’s wide of the mark anyway:  the cross-cutting between domestic scenes in Virginia and submissions being made to the Supreme Court, for example, is conventional, not to say obvious.  Fortunately, it’s also dramatically and emotionally effective, and an example of Jeff Nichols’s natural narrative gifts.  As in all his previous features, the cast includes Michael Shannon.  His role this time is small but his contribution is still considerable.  He plays Grey Villet, the freelance photographer who took pictures for Life of the Lovings at home.  Shannon is only on screen for a few minutes but he’s full of easy sociable wit in his conversations with the couple and their children; he radiates warmth and concern in the way that he quietly observes Richard and Mildred together.  During Grey Villet’s visit, even Joel Edgerton’s Richard is laughing.  Michael Shannon puts anyone in a good mood.

9 February 2017