A Southern Story With Punch
Start with an
infectious sense of place. “Mud” unfolds in rural Arkansas around a river where
people live in water rooted shacks and scratch a living from selling oysters,
fish, and reclaimed junk. Subsistence life sets the tone for this unlikely
country story. It’s the kind of tale that builds in your imagination under the
nimble touch of writer/director, Jeff Nichols, a meandering southern story with
punch. So settle in and let it absorb you.
Ellis (Tye
Sheridan) lives with his father and mother who are rolling through increasing
resentments toward separation. His friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) lives with
his uncle Galen (Michael Shannon) who collects oysters under a reconstituted
helmet that allows him to stay under water while he works.
Two
preoccupied broken families leave the boys free to explore their river. They use
an old outboard to journey into the wider water where they explore an island and
discover a boat in a tree, brought there, they think, by a onetime flood. A loaf
of fresh bread tells them they aren’t alone.
They meet Mud
(Matthew McConaughey), a fugitive from bounty hunters, who plays fair and square
with the boys except for a spun version of his emotional history. The boys
become Mud’s assistants in renovating the boat with materials they scavenge from
the local junkyard.
But director
Nichols has much more on his mind than a simple story of friendship between two
boys and their new friend. He will explore nothing less than the motivating
drives in human relationships. Ellis internalizes Mud’s tale of his lifelong
love of Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) and will do anything he can to reunite them
- “because you love each other.” It’s not quite that simple says Tom (Sam
Shepard, majestically astride his houseboat), an old friend of Mud’s. Ellis
chooses, at 14, a girlfriend of his own who he will protect in the way Mud says
he protected Juniper. For Ellis, love and loyalty have become paramount in all
friendships and he assumes the role of protector of his new friends. We, in the
meantime, have become intrigued with every single one of them.
Will Ellis’s
family reunite? Will Tom help Mud? Will Mud get caught? Can Ellis solve the
problems of this thoroughly unstable group? Because we care so much about them,
we want the movie to end before the seemingly inevitable bad is visited on them.
Soap opera,
you ask? Not really, and that’s because Tye Sheridan creates Ellis in such a
remarkable way that we would leap from our seats to protect him from threat
ourselves. This young actor manages to take his character from child to adult in
two hours, a remarkable feat for him, a rare experience for us. Matthew
McConaughey plays Mud with an unaccustomed restraint that allows his duet with
Tye Sheridan to unfold in unspoiled harmony. Director Nichols has set a southern
story in a metaphorical field of big questions and his whole cast got the point.
Copyright (c) Illusion