Films like Loving are not supposed to be this quiet. At times, it feels almost aggressively understated. When placed under the weight of racial injustice, cinema usually has the tendency to aggrandize, fill itself with a sweeping righteousness, sometimes to a fault. Director Jeff Nichols takes a different tact with his latest film, a true story about an interracial couple in the 1960’s whose marriage was deemed illegal in their home state of Virginia. Nichols seems to have little interest in hitching his wagon to the broader strokes of the Civil Rights Movement of the time, and more interest in the couple themselves. The film sympathizes almost exclusively with Richard and Mildred Loving, and their love the takes up the entirety of the film. The young filmmaker – who also wrote the screenplay – doesn’t seem to think any further historical context is needed to feel the injustice that is happening to the innocent Lovings. You don’t need to be shown Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks to understands that Loving is a film about civil rights, but Nichols more than anything wants you to see it as a film about love. Those are all the stakes you need.
Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga play the Lovings, a rural couple living in the outskirts of Virginia. Richard lays brick for a living and builds race cars as a hobby. He was raised without prejudice in his heart, with a seeming absent-mindedness when it came to the racism facing blacks who lived in his part of town. When Mildred finds out that she’s pregnant, Richard asks her if she wants to get married. Aware that interracial marriage is illegal in their state, they drive to DC for the ceremony, and drive back to Caroline County where Richard has purchased an acre of land he plans to build a house on. Not long into their marriage, their door is kicked open by police who arrest the Lovings under Virginia law. A tidy plea deal gets a one-year prison sentence suspended, but only under the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia for at least twenty-five years. Mildred finds herself separated from her committed family, Richard separated from his job and the acre of land he’d planned to turn into his family’s future home. After five years in DC, Richard and Mildred – now with three children – yearn to return to their country life. With the help of an ambitious young lawyer named Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll), the Lovings get their case reopened and presented to the Supreme Court where a judgment could change not only their lives, but the country at large.
No other contemporary American film auteur has a more consistent sense of setting than Jeff Nichols. His view of Southern America is soaked in a tender affection. Take Shelter is his masterpiece, in which a Southern family must deal with their patriarch’s mental disintegration, but Mud and Midnight Special are two films so deeply ingrained in the fabric of the American South that it’s hard to imagine them taking place anywhere else. There is a stigma with the South, especially with Hollywood films, and extra especially with Hollywood films documenting American history. Its too easy for many to collar the area as one awash in intolerance; it’s become a nice scapegoat that lets other parts of the country feel self-righteous about their own troubled dealings with race. This is the key to Loving, which is the exact kind of film that Hollywood would have produced in the last fifty years to propagate the belief that the South is a bastion of hate, but Nichols treats the film’s setting as just that, and lets the people that populate that setting tell the story. Loving isn’t going for cineme-verité style reality, but it is seeking a truthfulness in this couple’s struggle and it finds it.
Edgerton appeared in Nichols’ Midnight Special earlier this year, and in both that film and Loving, the actor gives a performance of riveting restraint. Michael Shannon, Nichols’ most common repertory participant is limited to a single-scene role as Grey Villet, a Life Magazine photographer who immortalizes the Lovings in a sweet photograph of the two watching television. As Richard Loving, Edgerton is hard-nosed and achingly sad. When the institutions of law fail him, he becomes immediately distrustful, even of the media looking to sympathize with their case. It’s Ruth Negga’s Mildred who must do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to getting their story to the public. As a person of color, Mildred is used to fighting for her place, and Negga shows this spirit in a performance that shines with passion even through Nichols’ muted aesthetic. As Nichols whittles the nationwide vastness of the Lovings’ trial into a narrow road that goes from rural Virginia to Washington DC, Edgerton and Negga are the ones that show the audience just how much the Lovings did accomplish, simply by having a love so radical some would call it illegal.
Loving takes Nichols away from the existential dread of Take Shelter, the gothic romance of Mud and the Spielbergian science fiction of Midnight Special. It brings him into a much more traditional format, even if the young director is doing his best to subvert the very popular prestige American sub-genre of Civil Rights films. It will possibly be his most successful film (if not financially, definitely in terms of awards attention), even while being his least interesting. Nichols may be pursuing a mature reputation as a filmmaker that can make “important” films, and it’ll say something about the moviegoing public if Loving is what gets Nichols the respect he’s deserved since he released the masterful Take Shelter in 2011. Loving isn’t a perfect film. It puts WAY too much faith in a performance from comedian Nick Kroll, and its surgical dedication to subtlety really sacrifices some of the film’s opportunities for thematic heft. Like Midnight Special, a film of his released only this March, we are seeing fascinating glimpses from an exceptionally talented young director, glimpses that could lead to a truly captivating cinematic career. If Loving helps Nichols reach that destination sooner, than its an even more important film than I think it is.
Written and Directed by Jeff Nichols