2016 Archives - Words and Movies Podcast

Loving (2016) – Review

Mildred (Ruth Negga) and Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton).

Jeff Nichols is another acclaimed director whom I’ve never fully been able to get behind. He has a sharp visual eye, but his stories have never been quite satisfactory to me, even Take Shelter, his acclaimed 2011 film starring Jessica Chastain and his usual star Michael Shannon. Not until Midnight Special, Nichols’ take on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, did I start to warm up to him, and even that film lost its footing near the end. I had no such problems, however, with Nichols’ fine docudrama Loving (not to be confused with Irvin Kershner’s film of the same name, which I covered when I wrote about my favorite films of 1970).

Recreating the famous photo from Life magazine.

Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) was a construction worker in Central Point, Virginia, who knew Mildred Jeter (Ruth Negga) since they were younger. When Mildred got pregnant by him, Richard unhesitatingly agreed to marry her, which by itself was not unusual. However, this was 1958, and Virginia was a number of states at the time that had anti-miscegenation laws outlawing interracial marriage, and since Richard was white and Mildred was black, they were forced to leave Virginia (though they came back briefly so Richard’s mother Lola (Sharon Blackwood), a midwife, could help deliver Mildred’s baby). The Lovings moved to Washington D.C., and while Richard was able to find steady work, and their three children seemed happy enough, Mildred never really felt at home there. One day, she wrote a letter to Robert F. Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general, to ask if there was anything he could do to help her and Richard. Kennedy ended up referring the letter to the ACLU, and Bernard Cohen (Nick Kroll), a lawyer associated with them, took on the case, promising to work pro bono on the Lovings’ behalf. They ended up moving back to Virginia (Cohen suggested it, and Richard resisted, but in the movie, when one of their children gets hit by a car – though he doesn’t get hurt – Mildred told Richard they needed to move back). Cohen, with the help of constitutional law expert Phil Hirschkop (Jon Bass), ended up bringing the case to the Supreme Court, and in Loving v. Virginia, decided June 12, 1967, the court unanimously declared Virginia’s law was unconstitutional under the 14th amendment, and also declared such laws to be unconstitutional nationwide.

Oddly enough, for a movie about such an important case, Nichols devotes little time to specific legal details. We do see Mildred and Richard’s initial arrest by Sheriff Brooks (Martin Csokas), and their initial attorney Frank Beazley (Bill Camp) arrange a plea deal with Judge Bazile (Frank Jensen), as well as Cohen and Hirschkop presenting their initial arguments to the Supreme Court, but that’s about it. Instead, Nichols focuses on the day-to-day lives of the Lovings themselves, inspired by Nancy Buirski’s documentary THE LOVING STORY from 2011. Since both Mildred and Richard were reticent by nature, and were devoted to each other, this makes for a quiet, rambling film, rather than your usual muckraking or uplifting approach. Some critics were put off by this, but I was drawn in. Nichols and cinematographer Adam Stone (who also shot Take Shelter and Midnight Special) capture the slow rhythms of Central Point, and the ease at which Mildred’s family and friends have with each other there. He also shows how Mildred, in her own quiet way, was the one who forced the decisions; she was the one who wanted to have her first baby back in Central Point, she was the one who contacted Kennedy, she was the one who kept in touch with Cohen, she was the one who pushed Richard for them to move back to Central Point, and she was the one who did the publicity, which Richard wanted no part of.

Bernard Cohen (Nick Kroll), the Loving’s lawyer.

Negga, whom I remember best playing the somewhat sympathetic villain on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., brings a quiet dignity to Ruth. When she shows Mildred making her decisions on what to do, there’s no fuss about her manner at all, just simple determination. Edgerton, who was in Midnight Special, also brings a quiet reserve to his performance; when Cohen asks if there’s anything Richard wants him to argue at the Supreme Court, he replies, “Tell the judge I love my wife.” Kroll brings a charge to all of his scenes, and Shannon for once plays against type as the affable Life magazine photographer Grey Villet, who took the famous picture of the Lovings sitting on the couch, intimate with each other, while watching “The Andy Griffith Show”. Loving is more about the people involved in Loving v Virginia than the case, and Nichols makes it work here.

Reel 64: Same Title, Different Movie (redux)

Yowza, my friend. Welcome to the land of weird issues with this episode.

Just to peel back the curtain a little bit, Sean and I record an episode, then later on I do some editing, I put in the music and Alex’s bits, then I package everything and run it through some software called Auphonic to make sure everything’s evened out and compressed a little for your consumption, plus I make up the artwork and write these bits. And usually the editing is the easy part. This time around, however, it was the hard part. There were some odd glitches on his side that I didn’t hear during recording, so I had to make some peculiar repairs to the sound, and that meant using some of the backup audio that we record. Then on the run through Auphonic, I bumped into the software inserting huge silent gaps in the show, which needed to be cut out again as seamlessly as possible.

On top of all that, Sean and I do have day jobs, ya know. Neither of us make a dime on the show; it’s a labor of love, baby.

Okay, enough whining, because this episode deals with a couple of great films that really should be getting more attention, and coincidentally they both have the same title despite being about very different subjects.

The title for this episode’s films is Loving, and the first version is from 1970, directed by Irvin Kershner. It stars George Segal and Eva Marie Saint as a couple whose relationship is unwinding just at the point where Segal’s character is just starting to get his career back on track. It’s a serious story with a comic overlay on it, and while some of it may be a little dated, it’s a compelling story regardless.

In part 2, the “Loving” in the film is in the form of Mildred and Richard Loving, a real-life couple who decided to take their relationship and make a Federal case out of it. Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton play the lead roles in this 2016 film directed by Jeff Nichols. It’s worth noting that most of the events of this film took place during our lifetimes—okay, MY life; Sean was born the year after the Loving decision was handed down by the Supreme Court. The bottom line is, attitudes about such things were quite different not very long ago.

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

In our next two episodes, we take a look at remakes which managed to surpass the original version. We start with The Man Who Knew Too Much, a 1956 film starring James Stewart. From there we jump to 1988’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a film that I’m still not 100% clear the studio knew how to market.

Reel 35: Scorsese and Christianity

Martin Scorsese has never shied away from the fact that he is a Catholic, and that his religion oftentimes informs his work. There are few places where it’s more overt than in the two films we cover this week.

First we have 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which portrays a side of Jesus (Willem Dafoe) that many of us suspected he had, but most of which is never portrayed in the Bible. Roughly the last third of the film gives us a “what if” scenario that had a lot of religious conservatives up in arms for awhile–and that was before anyone had even seen the film.

From there we jump forward to 2016 (and from the first century AD to the seventeenth), for Silence, starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and Liam Neeson. It’s not an especially famous title in the Scorsese catalog, at least not to the casual movie fan, but it’s a powerful piece of work that will have you questioning your faith and that of the characters in the film.

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

Episode 36 is the first in a series of episodes featuring films that critics seem to think you can like one or the other but not both. Well, we argue that you can, indeed, like both, and we show you why. We start with a pair of Westerns: beginning with 1952’s High Noon, and then it’s on to 1959’s Rio Bravo. The plots are similar enough to echo one another, but you won’t think “remake” when you see the second film.