Richard Brody
Jeff Nichols's "Loving": An Airbrushed Portrait of the Interracial Couple Whose Struggle Changed History
Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as Richard and Mildred Loving in Jeff Nichols's "Loving."Photograph by Ben Rothstein / Focus Features / Everett
Each movie stands on its own, but outside knowledge pertains as well—moviegoing isn't a trial in which viewers can simply disregard whatever else they know or happen to have seen. Early this year, when I heard about the anticipated release of "Loving"—Jeff Nichols's dramatization of the lives and struggles of Richard and Mildred Loving, whose challenge to Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws led to the Supreme Court's legalization of interracial marriage throughout the country, in 1967—I slaked my curiosity and got hold of a precursor, Richard Friedenberg's "Mr. and Mrs. Loving," a dramatization of the same story, made for Showtime in 1996. I'm glad I did, but I wish I hadn't; the earlier film, though directed with a workmanlike plainness, is written with an exploratory vigor and acted (by Timothy Hutton and Lela Rochon) with a spectrum of emotion and a spark of spontaneity that eludes the similarly accomplished stars of "Loving," Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga.
Rule of thumb: when there's a problem with acting, it's a problem with directing. Seeing "Mr. and Mrs. Loving" first didn't, I think, change my experience of "Loving"; rather, it helped to provide specific examples of the possibilities that felt absent from or unrealized in Nichols's film—and, in the process, that modest, brisk, and even brusque and rushed earlier film offers an over-all counterexample to the cinema of the art-house consensus, to the decisions and tastes that converge in many of the so-called prestige films of year-end releases and awards discussions.
"Loving" starts with Mildred, who's black, telling Richard, who's white, that she's pregnant. (The real-life Mildred was of African-American and Native American descent.) Richard's response to this news is terse: "Good. That's real good." The scene has already gone on a bit, with looming, moody, but not distinctive closeups of the two characters, at oblique angles that don't suggest their positions relative to each other, until Nichols cuts to a wider two-shot of them sitting side by side on a porch. Already the pacing of the film is portentous, lugubrious—how about just "slow." The definition of slowness in movies isn't absolute—it refers not to the speed of action but to the ratio of ideas to action. Movies such as "Jeanne Dielman" or "Gertrud" or "Colossal Youth" have long takes with not much physical action, but the ideas that arise in them are strong, abundant, original, absorbing.
Nichols does just the opposite: he reduces the characters of Mildred and Richard, paring their dialogue and their actions down to essentials as they relate to their heroic struggle to live together as a married couple in their home town, in rural Virginia. His strategy, throughout the film, is to monotonously amplify mood—more or less one mood, of frustration and conflict—and in the process binding Edgerton and Negga to a narrow range of performance, turning the Lovings into pure and pristine symbols of a struggle rather than ordinary people facing extraordinarily cruel laws and forced into an extraordinary historical role that they didn't seek.
The key word is "ordinary": in "Loving," ordinariness is trait-free. In "Mr. and Mrs. Loving," Richard and Mildred's courtship gets the action started; Richard, rising from his parents' dinner table on the way to his date with Mildred, raises his arms in a droll leave-taking that has more humor and heart than anything Nichols allows Edgerton. Then, in Mildred's family home, her mother (Jackie Richardson) gives them what teens would know as "the speech"—telling them, in a breezily conversational tone that belies her earnestness, not to have sex. But, in the course of the date (one in which Richard displays some noteworthy antics outside a soda shop) they do so, in Richard's car, even as Mildred, though willing, is fearful, knowing that she's doing what she's not supposed to. "Mr. and Mrs. Loving" has two things, two centrally human things, that the rarefied symbolic protagonists of "Loving" don't: sex and humor.
The contrast between the two films comes through in parallel scenes between Mildred and her sister: in "Mr. and Mrs. Loving," as the two young women chat on a lonely road on the way to school, Mildred admits that she's no longer a virgin, that she and Richard have had sex (and even this talk takes an intimate comedic turn). In "Loving," as Mildred and her sister take a walk, Mildred talks to her about Richard's plan to build them a house. Similarly, the scene in "Mr. and Mrs. Loving" in which Mildred tells Richard that she's pregnant takes place when he dashes to the outhouse—she tells him through the door, he comes out, and their dialogue, only slightly more ample than the few lines in "Loving," adds an entire extra emotional dimension: "Are you mad?" she asks. "No," he says, and then adds what Nichols's Richard doesn't: "You?" "No," Mildred responds. What Friedenberg includes in two mere words, and what Nichols ignores, is Richard's recognition that Mildred might be unhappy and might blame him. Despite the borderline low comedy of the outhouse dialogue, Friedenberg is more alert to the couple's mutual regard. His Richard does something simple and caring: he asks.
The Lovings, arrested and tried for their marriage, were forced, in a plea bargain that allowed them to avoid imprisonment, to leave Virginia. They moved to Washington, D.C. In that setting, too, Friedenberg develops the Lovings' story and the distinctive characters of Mildred and Richard with far more detail, substance, and drama. To begin, they have trouble finding a place to live—whites won't rent to them, but Richard won't disclose that fact to Mildred. They find an apartment in a row house in a seemingly all-African-American part of the city, but Richard is keenly aware that they're living in substandard housing in a neglected neighborhood. Meanwhile, during his days at work, Mildred, staying at home, makes friends from the neighborhood, especially an insightful older woman, Sophia (Ruby Dee), and a civil-rights activist and street preacher named Blue (Isaiah Washington). Richard is deeply resentful of her friendships, and is especially suspicious of the sharply dressed, fast-talking Blue, whom he calls a pimp and tries to fight. In "Loving," there's no such conflict at all.
The 1963 March on Washington figures in both movies; in "Mr. and Mrs. Loving," Mildred is prepared to go with their neighbors, but Richard doesn't want to—demurring, saying they can see it better on television. It's obvious that he's reticent about taking part in a civil-rights demonstration, and Mildred, deferring to him, stays with him as her friends leave. Then Richard loses his job—and believes that it's because his bosses suspected him, albeit wrongly, of taking part in the march. By contrast, in "Loving," the march gives rise to a howler of a line that faux-casually trumpets a major plot point, when Mildred's landlord tells her, "You need to write Bobby Kennedy and get you some civil rights."
Of course, writing to Bobby Kennedy is exactly what Mildred Loving did; he passed the letter along to the American Civil Liberties Union, where a lawyer named Bernard Cohen took their case and ultimately won it in the Supreme Court. It's at this point in the film that "Loving" shines. Nichols places much more emphasis on the creation of a case; he dramatizes the involvement of a second civil-rights lawyer, and, above all, he captures something that Friedenberg, in his rushed and superficial resolution, doesn't—the importance of creating a public image in making history, and the turmoil in the lives of private and ordinary people, such as the Lovings, when the media come calling to make them celebrities. Unlike "Mr. and Mrs. Loving," "Loving" is a film with one big and good idea, and this is it.
In "Loving," Richard's particular reticence—his unwillingness to attend the Supreme Court hearing, his discomfort on camera, his taciturn responses to interviewers—are moving conclusions to a drama that's ultimately about the desire of ordinary people to live their own lives and merely be left alone. Mildred is keenly aware of the historic role that they've taken on, and she's ready to accept it—but she defers to her husband's aversion to the limelight. Here, it's a Life magazine report on the couple that leads to some trouble at Richard's workplace, which gives rise to another element that Nichols includes but that's missing from the TV movie: the fear of vigilante violence that the Lovings endured.
Nichols has an eye for texture and a dramatic sense of scenes unfolding in detail that Friedenberg can't approach. "Loving" is a much finer film; but in its refinement, it misses the coarser grain of life that makes the difference between an airbrushed portrait and cinematic vitality. Nichols makes the Lovings not merely heroes but saints; he doesn't create mysteries but blanks. Friedenberg, for all his directorial bluntness, made a film about complex people whose human impulses and desires and passions make them of interest in and of themselves.
Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999. He writes about movies in his blog, The Front Row. He is the author of "Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard."
More:Civil RightsJeff NicholsLovingLoving v. Virginia
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