Mud­bound

The expan­sive scope of Dee Rees’ third fea­ture, Mud­bound, is a spec­ta­cle to behold and cher­ish. It offers burn­ing proof that cin­e­ma can be employed to cap­ture the grand sweep of his­to­ry and the slow, grind­ing tec­ton­ic plates of ​“progress” with­out the aid of swelling bud­gets, intri­cate spe­cial effects and armies of extras. This pul­veris­ing­ly sad his­tor­i­cal saga is ripped from the pages of Hillary Jordan’s 2008 nov­el which cen­tres on a plan­ta­tion in the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta through­out the 1940s, divid­ing its objec­tive eye almost 50/50 between the upward­ly mobile white landown­ers and the dirt-poor black house­hold who live on and work the fields.

From the out­set, Rees’ cool­ly majes­tic film dis­plays all the trap­pings of a hand­some pres­tige pic­ture pur­pose built for the awards set, though it’s not long before a deep­er, more lyri­cal work blos­soms. As its sto­ry devel­ops, we are allowed access to the inner mono­logue of most of the key play­ers. These aren’t direct por­tals into the mind that offer instant emo­tion­al insight, more lit­er­ary mus­ings on life, the world, reli­gion, fam­i­ly, eco­nom­ics and con­flict. The wist­ful poet­ics of Ter­rence Malick’s Days of Heav­en instant­ly spring to mind as a tran­scen­den­tal touchstone.

Broth­ers Hen­ry and Jamie McAllan (Jason Clarke and Gar­rett Hed­lund) are seen dig­ging a pit in the dri­ving rain. They dis­cov­er a skull in the ground, and Hen­ry says they have to start again, as his father can’t be buried near a slave grave. Henry’s wife Lau­ra (Carey Mul­li­gan) enters the fray, and every­one looks ner­vous and a lit­tle con­trite. Black farmer Hap (Rob Mor­gan) and his fam­i­ly trun­dle by in a cart, and he sends an icy glare to Hen­ry when asked to help low­er the cof­fin into the ground. The film flash­es back to build out the earth-shat­ter­ing con­text for this strange, awk­ward set-to.

The Jim Crow south remains a hotbed of per­se­cu­tion and hatred, and it tran­spires that the McAllans find them­selves split between the atti­tudes of Henry’s hard­core racist pap­py (Jonathan Banks) and a desire to tran­scend this anti­quat­ed and evil sys­tem of oppres­sion. The Jack­son clan do their best to keep their heads down. They make sure that their cor­dial rela­tion­ship with the McAllans nev­er devel­ops into some­thing that may even­tu­al­ly cause them harm.

Mary J Blige is extra­or­di­nary (and unrecog­nis­able) as Flo­rence Jack­son, the only char­ac­ter able to see the shift­ing of cul­tur­al sands. She speaks in mut­ed, husky tones, per­haps know­ing that dark­ness lurks ahead. Her stripped-back per­for­mance is spell­bind­ing, as she imbues the stock ​“strong” matri­arch char­ac­ter with a per­sis­tent sense of help­less­ness and sup­pressed longing.

Mud­bound feels unique in its dri­ve to place issues of race against a broad­er back­drop of glob­al his­tor­i­cal events. Jamie and Ron­sel Jack­son (Jason Mitchell) head to Europe to fight the war, and even though they come back changed men, they find a coun­try that has been pre­served in sticky, opaque amber. They wit­nessed blood being spilled in the name of free­dom, and can’t com­pre­hend why the fer­vour to pre­serve a soci­ety fuelled by com­pas­sion rather than con­tempt doesn’t yet exist at home. Rees works the mate­r­i­al slow, hard and long, and so it’s only when you reach the clos­ing chap­ter that her bril­liant MO is ful­ly realised.