CAN RUTH REALLY FEEL OSCAR LOVE?
Negga’s good but Joel is real star
‘The scenes are authentic, as are the costumes and sense of period... it’s beautifully shot in muted colours’
Loving Cert: 12A 2hrs 3mins ★★★★★
There’s no doubt Loving deserves an Oscar nomination. However whether it should have gone to Irish actress Ruth Negga is another matter. For this reviewer, her co-star Joel Edgerton’s performance eclipses everyone else in the film. The fact that Negga, who is undoubtedly a fine actress, got the nod on this occasion may have had more to with the importance of the subject matter and timing of the film rather than the dazzling quality of her acting.
To put it another way, she’s good but not that good.
Written and directed by rising star Jeff Nichols, who brought us Mud in 2013, Loving, telling a story of racial intolerance and the American civil rights movement, is based on real events.
Richard Loving (Edgerton), who is white, and Mildred Jeter (Negga), who is mixed race, were legally married in Washington DC in 1958, but when they returned to their small home town in Virginia they fell foul of the state’s antimiscegenation laws that prohibited inter-racial marriage.
The movie opens with the simple words ‘I’m pregnant’ and from this flows an uncomplicated story which sees the couple arrested, tried, banished from their home state and eventually emerging victorious from the American Supreme Court.
Their story unfolds as they settle in different places, trying to put down roots away from their community.
As the legal case gains credibility and the backing of the civil rights movement, it is clear that Negga’s character understands the magnitude of their constitutional challenge while her husband, a simple brick-layer, just wants to be with his wife and children.
His struggle is very much an internal one and he couldn’t be further removed from the bombastic Hollywood heroes who fight the system with clenched fists and pithy one-liners.
The first half is absorbing and atmospheric and Edgerton is superb as an anti-hero whose sole instruction to his lawyer in one of the pivotal scenes is to ‘tell the judge I love my wife’.
His simplicity makes him a very likeable character but his wary reserve also frustrates as their story builds. Ruth Negga is undoubtedly convincing as Mildred but it’s a restrained performance – her expression and body language conveying more than dialogue. The dramatic tension slowly ebbs away as the couple move to the more enlightened capital, the immediate threat of imprisonment disappears and we all settle down for what would prove a nine-year legal battle leading all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s an unusual tone for a Hollywood film, shunning grandstanding statements in favour of a more subdued tone. Produced by
the actor Colin Firth, the film has a very English sense of understatement to it.
The scenes are authentic, as are the costumes and sense of period, and it is beautifully shot in muted colours.
But all this understatement sometimes makes the film seems a little flat and while the internal struggles of the main characters are clear and engaging, it ultimately leaves the viewer wanting more engaging drama and a sense of jeopardy.
Despite most of the action happening within their domestic set-up, we learn little about their own relationship and how it was affected by their situation. There’s little outward celebration of their love yet it is apparent it’s there.
Similarly, there’s no mention or exploration of the more sinister elements of segregation in late 1950s America.
In one early scene a racist cop sneers at the Edgerton character’s father ‘who worked for a black man’. It’s an interesting back story but one which is never really developed.
In the end, perhaps the most shocking thing about Loving is not the content of the film but the fact that 60 years after these events, there are people who still hold the racist views portrayed in the film.