Mud

Trails for Jeff Nichols’ Mud showed two boys coming across a stranger, most likely a fugitive, in an isolated riverside environment. The man’s shoe heel imprints leave a trail of crosses. This left me with an uneasy feeling that the film was going to be an unacknowledged re-make of Bryan Forbes’ classic 1961 movie Whistle Down the Wind in which a group of naïve young children happen across a wanted murderer (Alan Bates) in an isolated barn and mistake him for Jesus Christ.

My fears were unfounded. The character, who gives his name simply as Mud, was indeed a fugitive, hiding out on a small island on the Mississippi having killed a man who had impregnated his girlfriend, then assaulted her causing the loss of the unborn child. Both the family of the dead man and bounty hunters are hunting him down intent on bringing him to arbitrary justice.

Mud realises that his only option of escape is by renovating a dilapidated boat on the island on which he is holed up. He seeks help from the two boys, Ellis and Neckbone, who discover him as they explore the island in their Tom Sawyer-style existence. The boys agree to supply the tools and materials Mud requires. Ellis also acts as a go-between for Mud and his girlfriend Juniper staying, under surveillance, in a local, seedy motel.

This is a marvellous, character-driven drama in which the acting is of the highest order. Matthew McConaughey, as the hunted fugitive has surely never been better. There is clearly an in-joke when his character tells the boys there are just two things he can’t be without: his pistol and his shirt – McConaughey having seemingly spent most of his film career displaying a naked torso.

Jeff Nichols also coaxes fine performances from the young teenage boys. Jacob Lofland is good as Neckbone. But Tye Sheridan as Ellis is given the meatier role and is quite simply superb as a confused and frightened boy who is experiencing his idyllic river lifestyle coming to an end: his parents are divorcing, their riverboat home is to be demolished and he is to move to the local town with his mother. If this isn’t enough, he experiences the pain and pitfalls of first love with an older girl as he aids a wanted criminal. Your heart aches for this lad.   

Reece Witherspoon is convincing as Mud’s ‘trailer-trash’ girlfriend and there is a great cameo from Sam Shepard, now remarkably in his 70^th year, as the loner no one knows  but who local legend believes has a murky and violent past.

It is no criticism when I refer to the film as a slow-burner. The film is set in a community where the locals are naturally taciturn and where formal authority is a distant and untrusted interloper. They do things slowly there.

Just last week I lamented that Michael McGowan had failed to make good use of the New Brunswick landscape in his small-scale drama Still Mine. No such criticism can be made of Jeff Nichols who makes the slow-moving and listless Mississippi River the very core of his drama, its languorousness clearly imprinting itself on to the people who are dominated by, and inconsequential to, its scale.

Amazingly, distribution for this film has been poor. It received only a limited release in the US, and here in Australia it currently shows on only two screens: one each in Melbourne and Sydney. This is incredible. A top-notch cast with a strong story confined to the artiest of art-house obscurity. I hope that the film’s merits will be recognised and it goes on to have a full release. Failing this, I suspect that in years to come, people will come across the film by accident and wonder how they ever missed it when it first came out.

****

The Look of Love

Director Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan collaborated a decade ago on 24 Hour Party People – a look at Manchester’s innovative music scene from the mid-1970s onward. It is considered by many, including myself, as a minor classic. So hopes were high as they united once more for this biopic about Britain’s erstwhile soft-pornographer-in-chief, and ultimately the country’s richest man, Paul Raymond.

Sadly, they cannot re-create the magic in this hotch-potch of a film which seems to lack any kind of compass and is unsure of the statement it wishes to make.

There is a total lack of irony as we follow Raymond’s hedonistic and highly lucrative lifestyle, giving people what many of them clearly want and for which they are happy to pay large amounts of money.

Steve Coogan as Paul Raymond frequently drifts far too close to his Alan Partridge persona throughout the film, and comparisons are almost invited as he shows Raymond impersonating Sean Connery to his friends.

There are under-weighted cameos from the likes of Stephen Fry and Matt Lucas; David Walliams plays a lecherous vicar, apparently a good friend of Raymond, but we are given no idea as to how he arrived on the scene and without backstory he comes across as  a superficial irrelevance.

The soundtrack is impressive, especially the Bacharach and David numbers, and the film does succeed in evoking a sense of period. But these are not enough. The film is ultimately superficial and unsatisfying.

2.5 stars

 Tim Meade