Smart and shocking race-relations drama
Mudbound drops simultaneously in cinemas and on Netflix, which snapped up this Forties race-relations drama after it was warmly received at the Sundance Film Festival.
As a home for the film, Netflix does make sense, because watching it often feels like binge-watching four back-toback episodes of something. It’s a minor problem that the story itches to be spaced out into an actual series.
The 2008 novel by Hillary Jordan gives us two families – one white, one black – whose travails in Second World War-era Mississippi suggest an update on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, with some of the flavour of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, too.
The very specific device Jordan borrows from Faulkner is multiple narrators – six, to Faulkner’s seven – who take turns to describe the story’s events. The Mcallan brothers, Henry (Jason Clarke) and the younger Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) pass this baton back and forth between each other and Henry’s wife Laura (Carey Mulligan), whose upheaval from Memphis to the Mississippi Delta sees her sacrificing all the comforts of a cosseted former life.
Meanwhile, there’s another family across the field – the Jacksons, black tenant farmers scraping together an existence on the Mcallans’s land. Their eldest son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) leaves them to command a tank division, while Jamie takes to the skies as an airman: an experience which bonds the two men only later, when they return, with a sense of futility, to a part of America still mired in abject poverty and prejudice.
Ronsel’s parents Hap (Rob Morgan) and Florence (an unrecognisable Mary J. Blige) complete the sextet, as a couple quietly enduring far worse deprivations than their white counterparts. They’re at the mercy not only of Henry’s stubborn, Jim Crow-era economics but the hideously open racism of his dreadful old father (Jonathan Banks).
Rees’s script, co-written with Virgil Williams, conveys this polyphony of voices via sections of voice-over for the principal cast, a riskily diffuse tactic on screen that even such directors as Martin Scorsese (in Casino) and Terrence Malick (lately) have struggled to make work. Her film resorts to jolting cuts from the sodden brown cotton fields to the bloodshed over Europe, as we take in the tours of Jamie and Ronsel in a too-abbreviated, merely illustrative way.
But Mudbound grows in conviction after their return, without so many shifts in focus to interrupt itself with. Mudbound’s brutal climax is a shock and an affront in all the ways it must be – and though the film is a little wobbly up front, it’s fully worth wading through. TR