In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been a pretty good couple of weeks for performing artists with Arkansas connections.
Little Rock native Jeff Nichols’ Mud may be the best-reviewed movie of the year so far; my former neighbor Ray McKinnon’s TV series Rectify is, in some quarters, being called the best show on television and the Arkansas Repertory Theatre has mounted a devastatingly powerful version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman that’s the equal of any play I’ve seen in New York or London. (And to carry on the homer theme, the lead performances are by relatively new Arkansan Robert Walden as Willie Loman and native Avery Clark as his damaged son, Biff.)
While Mud came in at 11th place in the weekly box office race, the only movie with a higher per screen average was Michael Bay’s sensitive bromance Pain & Gain. And while Pain & Gain - and probably everything else that opened last week - can expect to fall off this week, Mud is likely to gain, as it picks up more theaters.
While locally there may not be that many moviegoers who have yet to see the film (Little Rock was the second biggest market for Mud, after Los Angeles), I expect it to have pretty strong staying power. It’s the sort of movie that will benefit from strong reviews and word-of-mouth - quite frankly, it’s the sort of movie that might become a family staple. In some ways, it reminded me of another film by a native Arkansan, Jay Russell’s My Dog Skip. While the films are quite different tonally, they both explore father-son dynamics and don’t condescend to their young stars.
I guess I worried publicly that Mud might be a different kind of Jeff Nichols movie, that the presence of Hollywood quantities such as Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon might cause the film to list away from the Southern naturalism that informed his earlier work, toward something less specific and more mannered. I was wrong about that: Mud may not be a perfect movie, but it’s rich and dense as bottomland, and it never lazily defaults to convention. While it may be Nichols’ most accessible project - actually, none of his films are obscure, they’re just so rooted in realistic detail and real life issues as to seem more novelistic than movie-ish - it’s not an obviously compromised work. You might prefer Shotgun Stories or Take Shelter, but you can’t argue that Nichols has sold anything out. Mud is of a piece with his other movies, it’s just a little different flavor.
Having said that, I don’t think it’s healthy to expect any artist to remain faithful to whatever vision we ascribe to him. I don’t necessarily think David Gordon Green betrayed anyone by making stoner comedies - and I don’t think those stoner comedies would have been so vilified if they’d been made by someone else. I actually found things to like about Pineapple Express and The Sitter - I skipped Your Highness, but some of what I read about it intrigued me a bit. I’m looking forward to seeing Prince Avalanche. I suspect Green will make a few more great movies in his career - and he’ll probably make some I don’t care for. And while I think all artists ought to do their best and take care of their talent, he doesn’t really owe me anything.
It’s altogether possible that Jeff Nichols will someday make a movie I don’t care for - everybody occasionally strikes out (or at least hits a weak grounder to second base). I just hope he gets a lot more at-bats.
And, if I can move to a slightly smaller screen, it’s a nice coincidence that Ray McKinnon’s Rectify is, in some quarters, being called the best show on television at the same time Mud has captivated the critical cohort. McKinnon played a pivotal role as one of the father figures in Mud, and like Nichols he’s a genuinely great dramatist who writes reality-based characters. He’s also a tremendous actor and a good man and if someone wants to call me out for liking him I guess they’re right. I don’t know that I ought to review Ray’s work - or Jeff’s either, for that matter. I am fond of these guys, I admire them and want them to do well.
I think Rectify - my buddy Graham Gordy is one of the writers - and Mud are really great examples of what I see as an emergent New Southern Cinema (for my purposes, I’ll consider long-form novelistic television series as a class of longish movies) and I’m proud of them. They’re the latest in a tradition that may have started - or been re-started - by Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade. (I’m inclined to cite Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused - which supplied McConaughey with one of his best roles - as a harbinger of the movement.)
The past dozen years or so have been a particularly rich time for regional Southern cinema: We’ve had Green’s George Washington (2000), All the Real Girls (2003), Undertow (2004); Nichols’ aforementioned Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter (technically filmed in Ohio); McKinnon’s Oscar-winning The Accountant (2001) and Chrystal (2004); Paul Schattel’s Sinkhole (2005), Joey Lauren Adams’ Come Early Morning (2006); Scott Teems’ That Evening Sun (2009); David Pomes’ Cook County (2009); Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010); and Linklater’s Bernie (2011). (I won’t object if you want to include Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild or the Ross Brothers’ Tchoupitoulas in that number, too.)
And the Little Rock Film Festival - which could fairly be called an incubator of this New Southern Cinema - starts up in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.
E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline.com
MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 05/03/2013