The story is focused on two families, one white family that moves to a rundown Mississippi farm to start over, and one family that works the land since slave times. Where one family is freshly planted, the other has its roots in the ground, in the town, in history. The white woman, Laura (Carey Mulligan) just wants to be a stay at home mom who cooks and cleans, but her husband Henry (Jason Clarke) has grand visions to raise crops and whatnot alongside his racist father (Jonathan Banks).
The flipside is a story of a mother named Florence (Mary J Blige) raising a wide range of children alongside her husband (Rob Morgan). Their son, played by Jason Mitchell, goes off to fight in World War II. This family lives in a rundown shack, working these dried up fields, trying to make a living. The story is less about a plot as it is about building up the sense of place. As Laura says, "I dream in brown. All I remember is the mud." That's for sure. This is a good looking and yet dreary place, photographed in pitch dark and then drenched in dirty water and overcast skies.
What transpires is essentially a friendship between Henry's drunk brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) and Ronsel (Mitchell) after they return from war. One black, one white. In France, they were treated like kings, liberating Europe from the vices of Hitler. Ronsel even begins seeing a French woman and the two fall in love. Back in southern Mississippi, he quickly realizes how little has changed. He is still forced to use the back door of a shop when in Europe he could openly be with white women. For all the hard fought battles, the life he returns to is anything but pleasant.
The story treads along through endless narration by every character and then some. It's a tired technique that can sometimes work to tell a story, but here we are just bogged down by this drone of voices offering us little insight into the film. Coupled with this narration, we have a noticeably jarring score of violins and percussion. Usually a film score can elevate the material we see. Here, it's more noise for the sake of it.
The Ronsel and Jamie friendship that forms throughout the film is certainly charming at times, as the two recount battle stories and cope with post traumatic stress. On the other hand, the film rarely elevates the source material into something larger than life. This is certainly a relevant story to tell, but did I enjoy the experience? I can't lie to you. "Mudbound" is awards bait with little to show for it besides the topic of race in America. It's a b-movie parading as some sort of art and then discussed afterwards in attempts to validate the experience of it all. Here's a movie where I suspect the book might be a more gripping encounter.
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