Review

Tender Loving Care

Film sticks to softer side of 1950s interracial marriage case

Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga) just want to be left alone to make a family in Little Rock native Jeff Nichols’ fifth feature, Loving.
Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga) just want to be left alone to make a family in Little Rock native Jeff Nichols’ fifth feature, Loving.

Social progress does not always move in a straight line. There are sometimes lurches and retreats as competing forces impress themselves on our politics. Even so, it seems remarkable today that not 60 years ago an American couple could go to prison for marrying.

Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Jeter (Ruth Negga) aren't uncommon people. In fact, they are determinedly modest, with no aspirations other than being left alone to live out their lives together. They are kids in love when we first meet, and when Mildred announces she's pregnant we see Richard's face register the news, moving swiftly through surprise and consternation before settling into a soft glow. This is a happy man and there's no question that he'll marry his lover.

Loving

90 Cast: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Marton Csokas, Nick Kroll, Terri Abney, Alano Miller, Jon Bass, Michael Shannon, Will Dalton, Christopher Mann, David Jensen, Bill Camp, Michael Abbott Jr.

Director: Jeff Nichols

Rating: PG-13, for thematic elements

Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes

But because this is 1958 Virginia, and because she is black and he is white and there is a law against miscegenation, they must drive off to Washington to get a license and pay the justice of the peace. The trouble starts after they return home and a midnight raid by sheriff's deputies lands them in jail. Richard is bailed out quickly, but he finds he's not allowed to make arrangements to spring his wife. Instead he's told to send some of "her people" to bail her out after the weekend.

Humiliated, the couple stand before an implacable judge who suspends their sentences on the condition that they leave the state and stay away for 25 years. So they go back to D.C., where Richard plies his trade as a bricklayer, building houses for other folks, while Mildred tries to make a home for her nascent family in a row house. When the time comes for the baby to arrive, they make a covert sortie into Virginia, so the new mother might be surrounded by her family and attended by her midwife mother-in-law. But once again the law intercedes; once again they stand before the judge. Once again they escape to D.C. -- this time with little hope of ever going home.

It's a surpassingly sad story that Little Rock native Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter) relates with a remarkable gentleness and precision while focusing so tightly on the primacy of private life that he invites -- and apparently has received -- some criticism for not playing up the political melodrama of the civil rights revolution going on outside the Loving bubble. (The family name is too on-the-nose for fiction; the strangeness of real life sometimes mocks the invention of hack writers.)

But there have been plenty of movies with white hoods, lynchings and cross-burnings, and few of them approach the affective power of Nichols' elliptical love story in which his characters resist Oscar-grasping speeches and histrionics to speak in mostly calm, resigned tones. Not even ugly racists feel the need to shout here -- after all they have the authority of law to wield. They legislate and adjudicate. Their narrative is the dominant one -- it's not even Richard's fault he has fallen in love with a black woman, they don't know any better in his poor, racially mixed community. After all, his daddy suffered the indignity of working for a black man. He was just born in the wrong place.

But Richard never avails himself of what one of his black drag-racing buddies call his "fix" -- after all, Richard is as white as Whitey Herzog, with pale blue eyes darting under his platinum buzz cut. He could just divorce her and go on his way -- maybe just divorce her and go on the same way -- and nobody would think a thing about him.

Instead, he and Mildred, seeking a better life for their growing family, sneak back into Virginia, living in a remote farmhouse.

Mildred is not quite the inwardly turned figure that Richard is (someone should write a thesis about male decency and shame in the movies of Nichols) but she's no crusader either. She does manage to write a letter to U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, which gets forwarded to the ACLU and receives the attention of go-getter Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) who sees the Lovings' case as a chance to strike down the miscegenation laws. But Richard would be satisfied if Bernie would just go to the judge with an assurance that the Lovings wouldn't bother anyone if he let them come home.

It's for certain that not everyone will appreciate Loving's relaxed and deliberately nonsensation pace; the only explosion of violence comes early and, while it's appropriately shocking, doesn't draw blood. And the Lovings stay out of the courtroom as Nichols elects to focus on the domestic arrangement the state finds so dangerous. Ironically that state's chief defense seems to be that it's unfair to bring mixed race "bastards" into the world, a point rebutted by the beauty of the Loving children and the unmistakable love that permeates this besieged and provisional home in the woods.

Loving will be criticized for not being more heavy-handed and conventional, but Edgerton and Negga have each created deeply authentic characters that might simply be too quiet for awards consideration. No matter, they perfectly serve this tender film about ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary moment of our revolving, repeating history.

MovieStyle on 11/18/2016

Upcoming Events