An early and serious contender for 2017’s Best Picture is a movie that may have yet to find its way to a theater had it not garnered so much critical acclaim. Dee Rees’s (Pariah) Mudbound is an original Netflix movie. Had it not been for The Academy of Motion Pictures’ rule of all Oscar-nominated films to be available to the public via movie theaters, who knows where it would have landed? This is not Netflix’s first movie to receive so much praise that the movie had to be released in the theaters. 2015’s Beasts of No Nation faced a similar fate. However, Beasts of No Nation‘s kudos faded as Oscar season approached, and the movie ultimately did not receive a single nomination. The same won’t be the case for Mudbound, which very well could earn a Best Picture nomination as well as nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Jason Mitchell Detroit, Straight Outta Compton), Best Supporting Actress (Mary J. Blige), and Best Adapted Screenplay to name a few. Of course, it’s an early prediction, and I have yet to see any of the other contenders, but this does feel like a poor year for movies. I would be shocked if Mudbound is not nominated for Best Picture, and I would be surprised if it doesn’t win at least one award in one of the other categories before cinema’s biggest night of the year is complete.
Mudbound takes place during the time of World War II. It is set almost entirely in rural Mississippi Delta farmland, with quick scenes cut in now and then to show two supporting actors fighting for the Allied Forces in Europe. In just her second directorial effort, Rees (who also wrote the screenplay) is masterful in so many different areas that if this movie is not nominated for Best Picture, it will be the biggest snub of 2017. Rees excels at (where a lesser director would most undoubtedly fail) getting us connected with so many different characters. It’s ambitious to tell so many other stories, regardless of how much they are intertwined. Often, the result is a complete disaster. This is not so with Rees, who narrates the story of two families, each struggling to survive and each in need of another, but, at the same time, set against one another by callous society because one family is white and the other black. I’ll discuss this later in this review.
In addition to excelling at getting us deeply connected to more than a dozen characters, Rees further demonstrates her genius by developing characters so deep and rich that it often becomes difficult to tell which characters are good and which are evil through the very end. The writers and directors of HBO’s Game of Thrones also do a brilliant job with this. When you think you know a character, the character changes drastically yet believable. The difference is that Game of Thrones is seven seasons worth ten hour-long episodes. Rees told her story in just under two and a half hours. Finally, what Rees knocked out of the park was the seductively tragic nature of her film. Some moments are breathtakingly beautiful, and ones just minutes later that are gutwrenching and extremely difficult to watch.
But Rees’s direction wasn’t the only thing going with this film. The story flowed perfectly, beginning with Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke – Everest, Lawless) and his brother Jamie (
The second family is the Jackson family. The Jacksons are living in equally wretched poverty. Preacher Hap Jackson (Rob Morgan – Shelter, Wetlands) is a sharecropper, laboring over hundreds of acres of land he knows he will never own. His wife Florence (Blige) helps plow the fields and raises their children while working as Laura’s maid. Their oldest son, Ronsel (Mitchell), is more progressive than his parents because he doesn’t just want to roll over for the white people. The film follows the Jacksons and the McAllans through tragedy and turmoil, their fates connected through various threads of circumstance, none of which are rushed, but some seem to be pushed a little too hard.
Plot 10/10
Character Development 9.5/10
Character Chemistry 9/10
Acting 9/10
Screenplay 10/10
Directing 10/10
Cinematography 9.5/10
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 9/10
Universal Relevance 9/10
94%
A-
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