Movie Review: Mudbound (2017)

A sprawling drama, Mudbound is the story of two families, one white and one Black, co-existing in segregated Mississippi of the 1940s. Friendships, racism, joint experiences, and the struggle to make a living all pose challenges to the various family members.

In the early 1940s, Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) of Memphis relocates with his wife Laura (Carey Mulligan), two daughters, and his racist Pappy (Jonathan Banks) to a farm he just bought in Mississippi. The Black Jackson family, consisting of Hap (Rob Morgan), his wife Florence (Mary J. Blige), oldest son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) and other children, are already tenanted on the land.

The two families get along uneasily, Hap working the land for lowly pay, Florence hired by Laura to help around the house, but Pappy always ready to spew his hatred. When the United States enters the Second World War, Ronsel serves as a tank commander while Henry's brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) joins the air force as a bomber pilot. Both return to the farm as changed men and strike up a camaraderie. Jamie drinks heavily to combat his post-war trauma while Ronsel, after helping defeat fascism, finds it difficult to accept entrenched segregationist attitudes. But much worse is to come for both men.

An adaptation of the 2008 book by Hillary Jordan, Mudbound is traditional but still captivating story telling. Director Dee Rees co-wrote the screenplay with Virgil Williams, and creates a rich slice of American history, carrying echoes of slavery and vivid portrayals of segregation, injustice, war, and the green shoots of potential healing between oppressor and oppressed.

The evolving tensions between the races underpin the drama. The virulent Pappy is a lost cause, and despite his advancing age remains capable of enormous harm in words and actions. Henry is more tolerant but nevertheless obtuse in his attitude towards the Jacksons. Laura treats Florence with more respect, but feels entitled enough to have Florence care for Laura's children at the expense of Florence's family. And finally Ronsel and Jamie are the future, two men exposed to the world and experienced in what unites humanity, and now well beyond judging each other by skin colour. But in 1940s rural Mississippi, their friendship is an unacceptable aberration. 

At two hours and 14 minutes the running time is stretched, and the middle act sags into relatively routine "day in the life" chapters, never less than engaging but definitely lacking in impetus. This arrives in the final 30 minutes, a harrowing reminder of the horrors lurking in the rural South where seeing a Black man sitting in the front passenger seat of a white man's truck is cause enough for bigoted outrage.

Although some scenes are too dark, Rachel Morrison's cinematography celebrates the perpetual mud and rain essential to give a life of hard toil and farming a chance. The ensemble cast members each get a few scenes to shine (and provide snippets of narration from multiple perspectives), but are not asked to stretch as most of the characters are familiar and tightly drawn within a small arc.

Two families representing history in progress, Mudbound is rich soil, suitable for burying the painful past and building difficult foundations for the future.



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Movie Review: Straight Outta Compton (2015)

A biographical drama set in the world of rap music, Straight Outta Compton is a hard hitting history of the band that controversially popularized gangsta rap.

It's 1986 in Compton, a troubled city in Los Angeles county, where gangs and crime are part of daily life and black youth are easily sucked into the turmoil. Eric "Eazy-E" Wright (Jason Mitchell) is a drug dealer, and friends with disc jockey Andre "Dr. Dre" Young (Corey Hawkins), who is already a young father, and O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) who writes rap lyrics inspired by street life.

Along with MC Ren and DJ Yella, they form the group N.W.A. (for "Niggaz Wit Attitudes") and record the song Boyz-n-the-Hood with Eazy E on vocals. A local hit, the track catches the attention of manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), and he signs the band to a record deal, although Heller cozies up to Easy E and ignores formalizing contractual arrangements with the other members. The group records the album Straight Outta Compton, including Ice Cube's controversial track Fuck Tha Police, inspired by the continuous and unjustified police harassment experienced by black youths.

The album is a controversial hit, the gangsta rap subgenre is born, and the group members experience success and fame beyond their wildest dreams. But bitter arguments about money soon turn the friends against each other, with Ice Cube the first to break ranks and launch a solo career.

Directed by F. Gary Gray and co-produced by Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, Straight Outta Compton is an engrossing and sometimes harrowing story about the power of music to launch a million conversations, and the destructive forces of extreme wealth and greed that come attached to fame and fortune. The film tracks the origins of a movement born from the intolerable Black inner-city experience, gangsta rap bursting out of the chest of a self-feeding cycle of hopelessness, poverty, and crime. N.W.A. decided to honestly rap about life on the streets outside their homes, and the imagery was decidedly not pretty but also impossible to ignore.

The film is long at 147 minutes, perhaps tries to tell too many stories, and the final quarter goes relatively soft and mushy compared to what preceded it. With Dr. Dre and Ice Cube behind the project, their perspective receives precedence while colleagues MC Ren and DJ Yella appear short-changed.

But despite some weaknesses there is no doubting the pure strength of the core story. As the world consumed the ballads of Whitney Houston and Lionel Ritchie and the pop tunes of Pet Shop Boy, Mr. Mister, and The Bangles with blissful ignorance, a musical seismic shift was rumbling into being. N.W.A. took rap lyrics to a new extreme of provocation, popularizing a subgenre fuelled by anger, in the process causing widespread outrage and gaining unprecedented notoriety.

It was a wild ride for a group of young men, and it is no surprise that internal divisions and external influences rapidly tore the group apart. The film presents Jerry Heller in a generally unsympathetic light, and there are other unhelpful meddlers looking out for their own bottom line in the form of Priority Records executive Bryan Turner (Tate Ellington) and Death Row records founder Marion "Suge" Knight (R. Marcos Taylor).

But regardless of the causes, ultimately N.W.A. proved to be just an incubating starting point for the varied and successful careers of Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, and the band was only going to ride its initial burst of enraged intensity for so long. The split represents a chaotic highlight in the film, a momentus release of venom, the former friends dissing each other on rival records, the film soaring to a rowdy and profanity-dominated apex.

Straight Outta Compton finds several other peaks, including a Detroit concert where the local police attempt to prevent the group from performing their most notorious hit, Ice Cube unleashing his frustration at a record company office, and Dr. Dre finally having enough of the aimless decadence purchased with too much money. The representations of the songwriting and recording creative process are functional, and several run-ins with law enforcement on the streets of Los Angeles are captured with raw emotion, setting the stage for the infamous Rodney King beating, which here serves as an effective I-told-you-so backdrop to the formative N.W.A experience.

Jason Mitchell, Corey Hawkins and O'Shea Jackson Jr. (Ice Cube's son) are all excellent in bringing the young N.W.A members to life and staying with them as they mature through nine years of insane highs and lows. Paul Giamatti is effective as Jerry Heller, a manager with enough vision to understand that he may have found the next big thing, but always with a self-serving glint in his eye.

Boisterous, loud and coarse, Straight Outta Compton is about voices silenced no more, consequences be damned, and both the personal and broader consequences are plentiful and often painful.

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