And the movie’s sense of history is woven tightly into its landscape. It’s told from the shifting points of view of each of its major characters, but it never feels cluttered or confusing. Rees, who previously wrote and directed the 2011 coming-of-age drama Pariah, has shaped the material beautifully: This is just a good story, period, and Rees never loses sight of that. But you can’t just write ideas on the screen: Your performers have to embody them, and there’s not a minute in Mudbound that doesn’t feel deeply felt and believable. Mudbound works as a thumbnail picture of midcentury American racism and injustice, and as a reminder of how slowly things really change in this country, as much as we like to think of ourselves as progressive thinkers and lovers of freedom. He finds a friend and comrade in Henry’s brother, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), a pilot who has also just returned from the war and is suffering from what we’d now call PTSD, though the men of his era had no convenient name for it. When he returns home, readjusting to civilian life is hard enough, but dealing with Stateside racism is harder still. Stationed in Europe - he’s a member of the 761st Tank Battalion, also known as the Black Panthers, made up largely of black soldiers - Ronsel faces different hardships than the ones he grew up with, but he also finds a new sense of freedom. They’re also raising a family: The oldest is Ronsel (Mitchell), who, stoking his mother’s greatest fears, goes off to war. So Hap Jackson (Rob Morgan) and his wife, Florence (Blige), just keep working the land, hoping to save enough to someday buy their independence. On a portion of the McAllans’ spread live the Jacksons, tenant farmers whose ties to the land go back generations by all rights, they own it, though they have no deed to prove legally that it’s theirs. Laura McAllan (Carey Mulligan) is young wife and mother who’s dragged away from Memphis city life by her domineering husband, Henry (Jason Clarke), an engineer who decides he wants to return to his farming roots. Mudbound - which was adapted from Hillary Jordan’s 2008 novel by Rees and Virgil Williams - is an intimate epic about two American farming families, one black and one white, working the land in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s. Together, they’re a reminder that actors’ key tools are the ability to listen and see, and not just react. Blige and Carey Mulligan - is attuned to the specific gifts of the others. Each actor here - in a cast that includes Jason Mitchell, Mary J. But watching a movie in which all the players are perfectly in concert is its own special pleasure, and that’s the case with Dee Rees’ Mudbound. All moviegoers, critics included, tend to zoom in on individual performers - it’s natural to find yourself drawn to just one face, one distinctive way of moving or talking. Ensemble casts are the ghost ships of awards season, group feats of skill and subtlety that pass almost unnoticed on the rolling, choppy seas of Oscar hype.
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