Mudbound

For her second feature, Dee Rees [writer/director of the sensitive and intimate indie Pariah (2011)] adapts Hillary Jordan’s 2008 bestselling début novel into a sprawling feature film that attempts to retain not only the spirit of the book, but also the author’s structure and literary voice.  Mudbound interweaves the lives of two families as they try to forge identity and purpose from a muddy, dusty, hostile piece of land in the Mississippi Delta during World War II. The story begins when wannabe farmer Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) he uproots his wife, Laura (Carey Mulligan), father (Jonathan Banks), and young girls from their comfortable lives in Memphis and moves them down to a cotton farm he’s sunk all their money into.  A family of sharecroppers—Hap Jackson (Rob Morgan), his wife, Florence (Mary J. Blige), and their children—have worked this land for many years. The uneasy and uneven relationship between these two families—one white, one black—begins on shaky ground that gets even more unstable after a series of misfortunes and the pressures dictated by the social structure of the Jim Crow South. Tensions further mount when the prodigal sons of each family, Henry’s brother Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund) and Hap and Florence’s eldest son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), return from service at the end of the war and strike up a friendship.

Mudbound strains under the usual pressures of feature length film adaptations that try to remain faithful to as many of their source novel’s particulars as possible, rather than re-envision the narrative as a movie.  All six of Mudbound’s main characters are narrators of this picture, but rather than having each chapter told by, and from the point of view of, a different individual, the eloquent inner musings of the various principals are heard in voiceover at key moments. These spoken thoughts fill in backstory or comment on events as they happen, but more often than not, they act as interruptions that pull us out of the world the filmmakers create rather than enriching the moments we’ve just seen. The differing amounts of time we spend with members of the two families (and the uneven amount of narration they get) keeps the movie unfocused for far too long. The lengthy, Memphis-set opening leads us to believe that Carey Mulligan’s Laura will be the central protagonist, but her importance to the story decreases as the picture goes on. (Considering how the film ends, I can’t help but wonder why it doesn’t simply begin with the McAllans arriving in Mississippi and meeting the Jacksons.)  Mary J. Blige’s Florence gets the least amount of backstory and narration, but her character resonates far more than the others we get to know in the first half of this movie. And if her thoughts were never expressly spoken on the soundtrack, we would still understand perfectly what goes on in her mind.

The most frustrating aspect of the film version of Mudbound is the opportunity it misses to fully explore on screen the experience of African Americans who fought in WWII. The way black soldiers were treated as liberators and full-fledged Americans by Europeans, only to be kicked back into second-class status (at best) upon returning to the South, is an aspect of American history that’s been left criminally unexamined in cinema. The only screen depiction I can recall that digs deep into this experience, where black soldiers were lauded as heroes while abroad and then viewed with resentment (and fear) back home, is the fifth part of the 1979 TV miniseries Roots: The Next Generations.  So much of Mudbound focuses on the experiences of Ronsel and Jamie, and the different challenges they struggle with after returning home from the war, that it’s hard not to wish Reese and co-screenwriter Virgil Williams structured their script around these two young men. There would still have been plenty of room to develop all the other family members and retain the major events of the story, but a bolder adaptation would have made many of the events we’ve seen depicted before in pictures about the Jim Crow South ring with fresh perspective and relevance.

Not that this film fails to cover the theme of black soldiers returning from WWII, it just doesn’t put it front and center until the last third of the movie, where it all but eclipses the other plotlines. This final third is where Mudbound achieves the most power because, while every member of the cast is excellent, Jason Mitchell and Garrett Hedlund are the only actors given enough space for viewers to fully enter into their worlds and get a tangible sense of what they’re going through. Their friendship is forged by common experience, shared loss, and an unspoken nostalgia for the battlefield that those who were not there could never understand. The many parallels between other characters that are touched on in the earlier parts of the film are understood from a more cerebral distance. And when terrible things happen to the two young men, they register with far greater resonance than any of the misfortunes, or events of any kind, that come before. Mudbound is a worthy film, but its ambitious desire to tell multiple stories overpowers the strong themes and moving moments of intimacy and compassion, sadness and terror, hope and regret.