Under the cloak of a Mississippi night, Florence Jackson makes an admission to her eldest son. “I dreamt about you, too,” she says during a serene midpoint in Mudbound. Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) has safely returned from the Second World War, serving in George S. Patton’s 761st “Black Panthers” tank battalion. While he was gone, Florence—played by Mary J. Blige, with the singer delivering a performance of harsh beauty—was so consumed by her concern that it began to haunt her sleep.
“What’d you see?” he asks.
Maybe it’s a mother’s instinct, but she never answers; “You’re back with us now” is all she’ll muster, and we never know if her dreams were in fact nightmares. Ronsel’s question, though, reflects the film’s more ambitious themes at play: sight and the illusion of presence. Are people and things as we see them? Can one in fact see beyond this plane to something better, or is the muck of racism and economic disempowerment too blinding to subdue? In contending with those questions, the movie becomes Netflix’s greatest movie-length triumph to date, and ushers the service into the tier of possible (and deserving) Oscar-winning studio.
Adapted from the 2008 novel by Hillary Jordan and directed by Dee Rees, Mudbound follows the arc of two families, one black and one white, in the American South of 1945, a time of historical reckoning. The Jacksons are a devoted unit of black sharecroppers who, for generations, have tended to the land—one now owned by Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke), a disaffected father of two who uprooted his wife, Laura (Carey Mulligan), from their unsullied Tennessee domesticity to the deltas of Mississippi.
Life on the farm is demanding work, and the ways in which each character’s physical and emotional labor is capitalized upon becomes a recurring motif throughout the film. A series of unanticipated events—a sudden illness that falls upon the McAllan girls, an injury that slows down work for the Jacksons—strings tragedies together in ruinous concert. Henry wants to make a profit. Hap (Rob Morgan) dreams of having his own land; “maybe that’s where the problems started,” he observes early in the film.
Both men intend to provide for their family the best way they know how. But the onyx of history is inflexible. The specter of race hangs overhead and debts must be paid—through sweat and sacrifice, through blood always. In speaking about her film, Rees described “the mud and suck and rain and sun continually working against them in their struggle to advance.”
When Henry’s brother, a former fighter pilot named Jaime (Garrett Hedlund), returns from the war, he strikes up an unlikely bond with Ronsel (and later sets his eyes on Laura). They’re both frustrated veterans who carry a great deal of trauma with them; worsening with each new day, they drink to excess and recount their time battling Japanese and German forces on the front lines. (PTSD was not officially classified as such until the early 1980s.) “Over there, I was a liberator,” Ronsel says. “People lined up in the streets cheering for us.”
But in the rural South, both men sink deeper into the mud, swallowed by the reality that their valor abroad will get them little back home. For Ronsel, this proves remarkably tragic: he wants to see past the troubles of today—that is, he wants to hope in a better tomorrow—but even his uniform cannot hide the fact of his black skin, and the terror it invites from less understanding white residents (I won’t spoil the ending here, but how Rees concludes the film will shock and inspire in equal doses).
In that way, Mudbound is a textured and unsettling work, and the question is not merely one of sight—what we choose to see in others, what we envision for our own lives, and how that contorts the world around us, how one might rise from the mire of his situation by choosing to look forward and not back—but also a narrative about love, family, and land, and how race complicates and binds these forces. (If there was ever an argument to be made that race is an economic construct, Mudbound is it.)
Rees’s films have always been concerned with the alchemy of identity—how it is formed, how it fractures, or how it is set on fire. In 2011, her Sundance darling Pariah mapped the canyons of young queer adulthood in the vision of Alike, a 17-year-old black lesbian growing up Brooklyn. With Bessie, the 2015 Emmy-winning HBO film, Rees told the story of celebrated blues singer Bessie Smith, who is regarded as one of the finest of her era, if not of all time. Mudbound, though, marks a singular achievement for Rees. It sows a direct line to 2017 with echoes to Charlottesville, the KKK, and the venom of southern decree that, even now, refuses to unfasten its fangs. The commentary is both subtle and alive in every inch of the movie, evidence that black people are still being forced to pay a debt to the land—the “hard brown back,” as Hap put it—they helped nurture long ago.
Netflix’s bet on Rees and Mudbound feels like an unquestionable one. The film is likely to elevate the platform to a stage that has eluded it since the introduction of original programming in 2013 (Mitchell and Blige are sure contenders in the supporting acting categories during awards season). In spite of frequent Emmy victories, the streaming service has only once won big at the Oscars, in the documentary category, for 2014’s The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life. But Rees could change that, substantiating a fact laid bare in her southern epic: life is not solely about what gets lost in the mud, but what, too, can grow out of it.
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