Mud (15.)
Directed by Jeff Nichols.
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Reese Witherspoon, Michael Shannon and Sam Shepard. 130 mins
Ellis and Neckbone are two young boys who live on the river in backwater Arkansas, a place where the major supermarket is called Piggly Wiggly. They go off one day to explore a remote and empty island and end up whistling down the wind when they come across fugitive Mud (McConaughey.) He ain’t ET, but he’ll do and on Ellis’s prompting the pair decide to help his bid to evade the law.
The latest film from the director of Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter is like a US counterpart to the British drama Broken in that it is a coming of age drama that has a broad scope and a number of other stories loaded onto it. There’s humour and little bits of visual poetry. Mud has a cracking first hour where the performances, the score and the directorial choices all tie together nicely. Gradually though that cohesion begins to unravel and towards the end there are some abrupt and clumsy shifts of tone. There is also at least thirty minutes too much of it and yet even with such a over-extended running time a lot of characters and subplots are underdeveloped – why drag Witherspoon into it if she’s just going to be left in a motel room for most of the film?
By the end it has frittered away much of the good will it built up initially but the trio of central performances are enough to keep it in your good books. The kids Sheridan and Lofland are very good indeed; engaging enough to hold their own with established scene stealer McConaughey. In a bigger role he isn’t quite as spectacularly good here as he was in Bernie and The Paperboy but it is still hard to believe that less than five years ago his name really was mud; a lost and beaten man, the deadweight being helped through romcom dregs by Kate Hudson.
Directed by Jeff Nichols.
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Reese Witherspoon, Michael Shannon and Sam Shepard. 130 mins
Ellis and Neckbone are two young boys who live on the river in backwater Arkansas, a place where the major supermarket is called Piggly Wiggly. They go off one day to explore a remote and empty island and end up whistling down the wind when they come across fugitive Mud (McConaughey.) He ain’t ET, but he’ll do and on Ellis’s prompting the pair decide to help his bid to evade the law.
The latest film from the director of Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter is like a US counterpart to the British drama Broken in that it is a coming of age drama that has a broad scope and a number of other stories loaded onto it. There’s humour and little bits of visual poetry. Mud has a cracking first hour where the performances, the score and the directorial choices all tie together nicely. Gradually though that cohesion begins to unravel and towards the end there are some abrupt and clumsy shifts of tone. There is also at least thirty minutes too much of it and yet even with such a over-extended running time a lot of characters and subplots are underdeveloped – why drag Witherspoon into it if she’s just going to be left in a motel room for most of the film?
By the end it has frittered away much of the good will it built up initially but the trio of central performances are enough to keep it in your good books. The kids Sheridan and Lofland are very good indeed; engaging enough to hold their own with established scene stealer McConaughey. In a bigger role he isn’t quite as spectacularly good here as he was in Bernie and The Paperboy but it is still hard to believe that less than five years ago his name really was mud; a lost and beaten man, the deadweight being helped through romcom dregs by Kate Hudson.
