by Murtada
About halfway into Mudbound, the new film from Dee Rees (Pariah), the matriarch of a family of landowners in the Mississippi Delta Laura Mcallan (Carey Mulligan) offers a maid job to Florence (Mary J Blige), whose family are land tenants of Laura's husband Henry (Jason Clarke). The offer comes after Florence had been forced to leave her own family for a few days to help Laura with her sick young daughters. It is a startling offer that comes out of nowhere and Florence isn't given an option to accept or refuse, but rather told it’s been decided to hire her.
However before the audience can process the audacity of Laura’s offer and Florence’s resignation, we are immediately pulled into a combat battle in WWII where Henry’s brother (Garrett Hedlund) and Florence’s oldest son (Jason Mitchell) have enlisted. Herein lies Mudbound's dilemma...
Too many stories, too many voice overs by too many narrators. In addition to the characters already mentioned, Mudbound finds space for Florence’s husband (Rob Morgan) who injures himself on the fields adding to his family’s hardship. And for Henry’s racist father (Jonathan Banks) who is a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
The film marks a bold leap for Rees from the intimate character studies of Pariah (2011) and Bessie (2015), to a story epic in scale and scope. Mudbound spans about 5 years from just before the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 to after the war ends in 1946. It takes us from drawing rooms of genteel Southerners to the mud filled fields of Mississippi to the battlefields in Europe.
The stories Mudbound tell are intriguing. Black men who fought in WWII coming back to a racist, segregated and unjust society. Uneasy alliances between white and black women in the south and the kinship they found in shared sexism. The Klan and how it chose its targets. In adapting the novel by Hillary Jordan, Rees and Virgil Williams manage to flesh out all these characters, giving them vibrancy on screen despite a heavy reliance on voice over narration. The film has an acute sense of place in its design and cinematography. One feels the mud, and not just because Laura keeps talking about it. It is in the editing that the film becomes choppy, not giving any one story or any one character the space to breathe.
Similarly the performances do not simmer and explode, despite the story calling for that. We are always rushing to to the next scene, the next story, the next character. Morgan emerges as the one with the biggest impression with a lived-in poignant performance as a man who understands all too well the limits of the position he's afforded.
Grade: B
Oscar Chances: The jury is still out on whether Netflix can manage to successfully get into the marquee categories at the Oscars. I don’t think this will be the film to jump that hurdle. Adapted screenplay is its best shot. There seems to be a big push to single Blige out from the ensemble, but her role is small.
Mudbound will be available to stream and in select theaters on November 17.