Loving (PG). Director: Jeff Nichols. Starring: Ruth Negga, Joel Edgerton. 123 minutes
A few weeks ago I wrote rather harshly about Hidden Figures, an unabashedly feelgood film whose broad sympathy for its black characters is eroded somewhat by the indelibly white perspective of its writer and director. I stopped short of accusing the filmmakers of maleficent cultural appropriation, partly on the assumption that they were well intentioned. Yet good intentions are not in themselves sufficient justification when it comes to the appropriation of minority stories by 'majority' artists. The task, if it is to be undertaken, demands greater care than mere sympathy.
Jeff Nichols' Loving, another 'based on fact' film, maps another, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying approach. Nichols, like Hidden Figures' director Theodore Melfi, is a white man offering a perspective on black history. Yet while his film purports to be a romantic drama about an interracial marriage, it is more precise to say it is, at least in its initial stages, a film about a white man's relationship with a black woman. It is set in Virginia in the mid-20th century (the same period in which the events of Hidden Figures occur); a time and place where such a relationship is beyond taboo.
Frank Loving bears the name that was taken for the film's title; he also bears the emotional heft of the film's first act. Inhabited by Joel Edgerton with a stiffly slump-shouldered stoicism and a slurred, mumbling manner of speech, Frank is the primary agent within his relationship with Mildred (Ruth Negga). It is him who endures the ugliest of redneck glares; yet he sees himself as a provider, and after Mildred becomes pregnant, he purchases property, swears to build her a house, and whisks her off to Washington DC to obtain a marriage certificate that will be legally void in their home state.
It's Frank's anguish that we witness in detail after they are arrested for this indiscretion, and it is Frank who is lorded over by the morally corrupt sheriff (Marton Csokas), who is barely able to contain his disgust at the biological convergence foretold by such a union. Frank literally slings cinderblocks for a living, and at the same time tries to make of himself a brick wall with which to preserve Mildred and their marriage from a hostile world. Mildred, on the other hand, through all this, appears docile and acquiescent, fearful, and glad