By M
I am so glad I am finally be able to join the general enthusiasm on this movie.
Let’s start with the camera. Nichols reinvents the close-up. I am currently reading a book that I highly recommend, the Image-Movement, by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in which he explains the purposes that the close-up serves. Nichols gives a perfect illustration of how close-ups transmit emotion, by using them widely but wisely: we get a lot of them, but the images that we see are simple, almost still. We had already been introduced to this way of shooting in Take Shelter.
The movie has a lot in common with Take Shelter, by the way. Not only do we re-encounter the close-up, but also the panoramic. We had skies and storms in Take Shelter, we get rivers and islands in Mud. Again, the use of the photography-like, quasi still panoramic views is inserted with perfection in the movie. And suddenly, movement arrives in such a way that it blurs the frontiers between human/machine/natural/social movements, there aren’t really any transitions, these kinds of movements are different stages of the same movement. The best example of this is when one of the characters is taken to the hospital. I won’t say more, for that scene crystallises all the topics the movie builds on.
The environment (in the sense of what surrounds the characters) is brilliantly shot, and so are the actors. Rarely have I seen Matthew McConaughey so beautiful, or Reese Whiterspoon. (It’s difficult to say the same about Tye Sheridan, simply because he was in The Tree of Life, but it would be true!) All the actors are perfect, absolutely impeccable, measured, right, delicate. The games of light are much more subtle than in Take Shelter, and we move to a more restricted – in terms of variation, but richer in terms of nuance, colour palette: we oscillate from green to gold.
The narrative style is complex, as in Take Shelter, Nichols opens up numerous leads that could make of the movie something else, something worse, and he then does not follow them. He manages to create a constantly redefined dialogue of potentialities with the audience, in such a way that you are 150% focused on the movie. You are so involved that the 2h10 it lasts feel like 90minutes.
The most touching element of this movie is the story, the rites of passage, the reminder of what “Love” means, but on that, I will let N write. The most original, and perhaps the best element of this movie is the depth of the dialogues, deep in two ways: because they draw the exact portrait of deep southern America and because of what is said about humanity and interactions with the Other, but on that I will let T write.
Watch this extraordinary movie in a movie theatre.
By T
The best thing I can say about the writing in Mud, which Nichols did himself, is that it is precisely, 100% on form throughout the movie. Every line of dialogue feels utterly at ease; it is so good that the specter of the writer never enters your consciousness as you watch.
This is a feat no matter what, when so many (even quality) films stumble forward at times with dialogue that is tone deaf. This is particularly true of films that portray some small, backwards portion of America, as Mud does with a slice of the South. Still more extraordinary is that Nichols has achieved this in a film that, because it is in part an adventure-coming of age drama, requires its older characters to impart wisdom. McConaughey and Shepard both take up this role at times, and never once does it feel silly. That is truly a serious accomplishment.
Tye Sheridan’s character is a very self-sure and self-confident, very strongly masculine one, which at the same time suffers the limitations that go along with being 14 years old. This makes him a gold mine of human interaction, because he is constantly facing up to people who are unlike he is: adults, his own parents, women, girls, the parents of others, strangers, Matthew McConaughey, The World… The movie adopts his perspective (I think there is not a scene he is absent from) and thus offers classic defamiliarization done expertly, a fresh look at old things – for those of us not 14, anyway.
But there is so much more. The interaction of Sheridan’s mother and father comes most readily to mind, especially as one of the interactions which does not depend centrally on Sheridan’s involvement. There is one scene I will not spoil that exposes demands and failures of fatherhood, husbandhood, and masculinity better than anything I have ever read or seen.
My list could go on endlessly. Sheridan’s interactions with his friend Neckbone (yes, Neckbone), with Mud, with Witherspoon, with the girl he takes to be his girlfriend. One particular scene between Sheridan and Michael Shannon is so, so noteworthy. They are all spheres.
There are so many good things to say about this movie that I find it extremely difficult to know how to say them. But as M says, it is a movie that is really, really to be seen, in the theater if possible.
By M
I am desperately waiting for my local movie theater to screen Mud next Friday. I am so excited about this date with Jeff Nichols that I have been telling everyone about it. And everyone has been explaining to me that Nichols is no one-night stand, he is a love story. So I figured that love stories need to start with the person’s life right before you meet them. Very consequently, I watched the movie he wrote and directed before Mud, Take Shelter, which happens to be his second movie and which got the Grand Prize Critics Week at Cannes in 2011. Just that.
The movie is great in so many regards that I don’t really know where to start. I’ll pick facility: Jessica Chastain. 2011 was her year (The Tree of Life also came out in 2011). I have never seen her like this and I already thought she was one of nowadays greatest actresses. She is perfect. Michael Shannon is so good too that you will have trouble keeping your jaws from falling in surprise: yes, they actually surpass each other in each scene.
It is worth stopping for one second on the best scene of the movie: Shannon delivers a delirious oracle-like speech in the middle of a suburban canteen while accusing everyone of suspecting him of craziness. It is breathtaking. I can think of many directors who should take a master-class with Nichols on how to guide actors through delirious oracle-like speech delivery (There will be blood speeches are a joke in comparison).
I insist: the two main actors are fantastic, and well supported by the rest. They are one of the pieces of the quasi-perfect sphere that this movie is. We get to observe them well, as the movie uses and joyfully abuses of the close-ups. But it’s all good, we want more. Nichols isolate movement in stillness and therefore, any movement counts. A tear counts. A frown counts. One actor moving while everything else is still. The branch of a tree moving, but a bit only, it might be too much. It’s delicate and precise, it’s about flavoring.
Nichols brings in flavors of Wim Wenders, working on diagonals, of Terence Malick, watching out on filming America with mastery and a scent of Jim Jarmush, and the reflection on colors. Your well-trained Hollywood brain will fear some of the leads he offers (e.g. Is the kid going to turn diabolic?), try not to do it, you’d lose, because cheap lead resolution doesn’t even cross Nichols’ mind.
The greatest thing about this movie is the sound, how sounds allow transitions and blur frontiers, which brings me to the story itself, which is about sounds. Sounds are the essence of subjectivity in this movie as the three main characters have different accesses to sounds: Shannon hallucinates/forecasts sounds, Chastain perceives them and their little girl “feels” them, as she is deaf. Sounds are crucial for whoever sound is “right” gets to determine reality, and subsequently any action that follows.
The movie, through sounds, is a reflection on sanity and craziness and how these relate to social and subjective time-frames, imposed by medical cultures. Much could be said about the dichotomy dreams/reality but something makes me refrain from spoiling the whole movie. This film is smart, analytical and uses all cinematographic tools to serve this purpose.
Needless to say it gets you, as through the meticulous care of details it nonchalantly creates beauty. Watch it, of course. Fall in love with Nichols and let’s go to see Mud.
cucurbitacee 