BEFORE: Well, I went through my list of romance films for next February, for maybe the fourth or fifth time, but sometimes it takes THAT long - this time I made little diagrams on paper with arrows showing which romance films on my list link to OTHER romance films on my list, and I put a good-sized list together of 42 films in a row - but then I double-checked it and found a break in the chain, so I had to tear it apart and start over again. But this did lead to a rough plan for February 2022, the second (sixth) time anyway, and I did this all not a moment too soon -
As I suspected, one of my films scheduled for November turned out to be crucial to the linking next February - it wasn't one of the two films I was worried about, it was one of the Nicole Kidman films slated for November. So that's off the 2021 schedule now, leaving me one film short for 2021. No worries, I'll just put the last film I dropped back into the schedule - and that film's going to fit in right after "Mudbound", so that means if I'd waited two more days to plan out my romance chain, it might have been too late to make the proper alterations. Sometimes I just get that feeling, you know? That the chain's not right and I have to fix it NOW.
The good news is that I now have a rough plan for February, and that's half the battle for figuring out how to start 2022. If I have a target film for February 1, then I can pick a movie for January 1 and work out the path between them in 29 or 30 steps. Picking a film to start the year without having the next benchmark in mind would be quite dangerous, and it's much easier to confirm that I can get from Point A to Point B once I know exactly what Point B looks like.
Anyway, Nicole Kidman's going to be fine, she's got four films slated for November instead of five, so she's still probably going to finish the year with 6 appearances, and that's a good showing in any year. Jason Mitchell carries over again from "Barry" and I'll deal with the re-added film tomorrow.
THE PLOT: Two men return home from World War II to work on a farm in rural Mississippi, where they struggle to deal with racism and adjusting to life after war.
AFTER: Just yesterday I was dubbing "Straight Outta Compton" to a DVD, over a year after first watching it, and I couldn't help notice the similarities to "Mudbound". Oh, they're very different films to be sure, and one's set in World War II era Mississippi and the other's set in the 1980's L.A. hip-hop scene, but the core of the story is the same, it's all white people profiting from the labor of African-Americans. From "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind" right up to "12 Years a Slave" and "Just Mercy", it's all one big story, we just see a little bit of it in each movie.
"Mudbound" just keeps driving the same point home, again and again - maybe it needs to, because there are still some white people out there who haven't gotten the memo, who might watch this film and root for the guys in the white hoods (heroes wear white, right?) and miss the point entirely. Or they may see the black tenant farmers being taken advantage of, again and again, by their white landlords and think there's nothing wrong with that.
I'm a little bummed that I couldn't get this one a bit closer to Veteran's Day, which is six days from now - if the holiday had been THIS Thursday instead of NEXT Thursday, maybe I could have hustled a little bit to get this to land right on the button. BUT I can't delay this review six days, then I wouldn't hit my Thanksgiving target. But a big part of this story concerns two men - one white, one black - coming back from World War II and battling depression, alcoholism, war guilt and PTSD (or shell-shock, or whatever they called it back then). Then there's the racial angle, as the black man who served as a sergeant in a tank division comes back home to Mississippi to find that none of the respect he earned in the service carries over to civilian life. So it's back to using the colored drinking fountains and entering the general store through the back door.
The white veteran, Jamie McAllan, served as a bomber pilot, and finds that his own father now considers him a coward because he killed Germans from a mile up in the sky, instead of up close and personal, face to face like they did in the trenches in World War I. Jeez, don't you think the guy's got enough to deal with, feeling guilty over bombing people, now you gotta go and call him cowardly, too? Jamie and Ronsel form a loose friendship over their non-shared war experiences, but mostly this just involves more driving into town and drinking, also drinking while driving into town.
Jamie's brother Henry, meanwhile, got conned while buying a home on a handshake deal, and is forced to move to the family farm, which is worked by Ronsel's family, the tenant farming Jacksons. Henry can't help but treat the Jacksons like servants, he expects them to help him unload the furniture, help his wife with sick kids, and then he nickel-and-dimes them on their farming deal every chance he gets, charging them for this, that and the other thing. (Henry's descendants would one day grow up to invent cell phone surcharges.).
Hap, the Jackson patriarch, also serves as the town preacher, and after he breaks his leg while doing construction work on the church, Henry needles him constantly about getting back to work on the farm, then suggesting Hap's wife and sons work the field in his place, then he goes and rents Hap a mule anyway, charging him for the mule, and the delivery of the mule, and also some kind of "convenience" fee. As in, it's very convenient for Henry to charge the Jacksons for every little thing.
Bad things keep befalling both families - Hap's injury, the McAllan kids get whooping cough, and then it keeps raining at the worst possible times, turning the fields to mud. Actually it looks like they always were and always will be mud, maybe it's just NOT a good place for a farm? When we visited Memphis a couple years ago, I was very confused because I kept hearing people talk about the city being in the "Mississippi Delta". Now, I always understood that the delta of a river was the land around where the river flows into the ocean, so naturally I'd expect the delta of the Mississippi to be down in Louisiana - but while in Memphis I learned that there is a giant flood plain that's ALSO called the Mississippi Delta, and it extends over seven states, including parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, bits of Missouri and Illinois, and large parts of Mississippi. Technically, it's the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, but that name's not very catchy, so it's commonly called the Mississippi Delta, which is confusing, but it explains why farms in Mississippi might tend to flood, and why the music in Memphis is called the "Delta Blues".
There are four or five different narrators here, which means a fair amount of jumping around in time and space - however, this means we're never wondering for long what's happening to those characters currently not on screen, we'll probably catch up with them fighting in Europe in a short while. But this is also manipulation of the highest order - notice that we don't hear narration from the two white and most obviously racist characters, because that would humanize them to some degree. No great loss, I suppose, but it hardly seems fair and balanced. Once the racist father finally leaves this life, it seems that many of the Jackson's indignities are over - except for one more last twist of the knife. Henry asks for Hap's help in burying his father, and surprisingly he doesn't ask Hap to carry the coffin - no, he needs Hap's skills as a preacher to say a few words before they put the racist bastard in the ground. Hap recites passages from the Book of Job, and that's as symbolic as anything else in the film - Job suffered all of God's punishments and hardships and still kept his faith, and that's what the Jacksons are also called upon to do, time and time again.
I'm just glad to finally cross this one off the list, it premiered on Netflix in November 2017, and it's still THERE somehow. Obviously when Netflix obtains the distribution rights to a film, they give it some kind of "favored nation" status, and hangs around much longer than the films that just get licensed for the platform, typically for a two-year period. But then maybe "Mudbound" is the exception because it was the first Netflix film to get serious Academy Award nominations, after years of voting bias against films on streaming services that had only one-week theatrical releases to qualify for the Oscars. Now here we are, four years later, and after the pandemic shut down theaters for most of 2020 and part of 2021, the Academy rules changed to allow films to qualify via streaming services, sometimes without even having that one-week theatrical run. Anyway, it took me four years to finally work it into my schedule, so that's done.
Also starring Carey Mulligan (last seen in "Wildlife"), Garrett Hedlund (last seen in "Triple Frontier"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Mary J. Blige (last heard in "Trolls World Tour"), Rob Morgan (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Jonathan Banks (last seen in "The Commuter"), Frankie Smith, Kennedy Derosin, Joshua J. Williams, Elizabeth Windley, Piper Blaire, Jason Kirkpatrick (last seen in "The Hunt"), Kerry Cahill (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), David Jensen (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Oyeleke Oluwafolakanmi, Kelvin Harrison Jr. (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Roderick Hill (last seen in "The King"), Lucy Faust (also last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Dylan Arnold (last seen in "Laggies"), Samantha Hoefer, Geraldine Singer (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Henry Frost (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Claudio Laniado, Charley Vance, Lex D. Geddings.
RATING: 6 out of 10 letters from Germany
No comments:
Post a Comment