I’m not sure exactly when it was I first thought of you. It was some time that summer, the one I wasted so brilliantly – swimming, liking girls from a safe distance and wishing I was Jairzinho. Somewhere else, across the sea, your mother was strolling down country roads, sitting dreaming by furze bushes, waiting for your song to arrive. When it came, she kept that song for ten years, then another ten, kept it for you. And Continue reading »
Got this in the post today.
Cicadas’ most spirited singing happens in the summer. Only the males sing and, when they do, they simultaneously disable their own ability to hear. Continue reading »
I wandered into The Queens for a quick drink the other night and, while I was waiting to be served, this bloke at the bar started talking to me. He was about my age, my height, my build: a little worn, intense, well-spoken, a bit stand-offish at first but, after a couple of pints, twinkle-eyed, sharp and funny. Sat down next to a gentle fire, we talked about Taylor Swift and Kanye for a while, then about Breitbart and Brexit, about ISIS and Trump, about the ongoing destruction of the NHS. We disagreed – amicably – about whether Pochettino was the right man to take Spurs to the next level and about the relative merits of Stax and Motown; we did that lazy, disingenuous male-bonding ‘can’t-live-with-’em . . .’ thing men in pubs do about women. We bought each other beer after beer, whiskey after whiskey; as evening slurred into night, he said he was from Enfield too, ‘sort of’ – we even knew one or two of the same people – though he seemed to dislike this city, this country, this slippery, hollow age much, much more than me: he loathed our lack of curiosity and wonder, our celeb-worshipping superficiality, our disconnections, our casual violence.
I liked him and he seemed to like me. And then things got serious.
Subtle and clunky, arty and crafty, nuanced and simplistic: Mud can be a frustrating experience. At times entrancing, at times flirting with absurdity, Jeff Nichols delivers an enjoyable, gorgeous-looking but, ultimately, incomplete piece of cinema that hits some, misses others of its targets and ends up a little too close to betraying the cultural lineage it’s so carefully paying its respects to.
It’s a sort of thriller, Mud, a sort of silver-screened Woody Guthrie/Springsteen song, a sort of folk tale, a sort of straightened-out Coen Brothers piece, a sort of Steinbeckian story of the family, and capitalism’s assault on ordinary people, a sort of Stand By Me-style coming-of-age movie, a sort of meditation on love, a sort of elegy for a disappearing America. Some of these it does well, some less so…
At times, there’s a breathtaking tension in the characters’ (and our) attempts to work out the truth about the relationship between Matthew McConaughey’s eponymous fugitive and Reece Witherspoon’s ambiguous femme fatale; there are shots of the Mississippi that are exquisitely, sparklingly seductive; there’s one moment of genuine, pleasurable shock. The whole thing is beautifully illuminated by Tye Sheridan’s performance as a Huckleberry Finnish kid struggling to force his way into an adult world in which men are crap fathers, hapless victims of feminine wiles, dark and reticent haunted ghosts… or all three. Sheridan, Witherspoon and the rest of the supporting cast are brilliant: it’s hard to take your eyes off them.
And the same is true of McConaughey, but not necessarily in a wholly positive way. Occasionally, both his character and his performance drag things ham-fistedly toward cliche, toward superficiality, toward artificiality, toward unintentional humour. He’s big, strong, monochromatic, Messianic; he talks like every cowboy/loner/misunderstood male figure in cinematic history rolled into one. There’s a rare delicacy to his responses in one scene that frustrates because of that very rarity: why couldn’t Nichols/McConaughey dig out more texture, more originality, more… authenticity? (And, while there’s a reasonable(ish) plot reason for McConaughey to do his usual crowd-pleasing thing and take his shirt off, by the time this happens the silliness of aspects of his character undermine the significance of the act)
All of which might make Mud sound worse than it is. And it’s a long film that doesn’t really feel long, it’s neatly paced, entertaining, literate and thoughtful. It pays too much homage to Great American Stories yet it’s sincere and sporadically winning in the way it attempts to do so. It straddles indie cinema and the mainstream unselfconsciously. It’s…good, pretty good. Not great – it could/should have been great – but still well worth seeing.