Review of Mud (2013) by John P — 11 Oct 2014

Well here's Mud in your eye! Hey, it was either this or the opening line to that Primus song. So here we are the two hundredth review and I figured what better way than to post an article that was pretty damn good last year. Okay maybe it was featured in 2012 but only at the Cannes Film Festival, however they did show this again in January of last year at Sundance and later was theatrically released in May of that same year. So in a way I am just going to label this as a 2013 movie to spare myself an argument. Any who when it first premiered it turned out to be a runaway hit with the majority of the audience and I was unfortunate enough to never see this in theaters , but I did manage to catch it on DVD. There is something about the director, Jeff Nichols, that he has this weird subtly to his work with his characters where the less said the better in some ways where he makes these characters have so much depth. It is the combination of the way he shoots his films, the way he scores them, and just the fantastic performances that he gets out of his actors. Also last year may as well have been the year of the McConaughey because he keeps topping every single performance that he is in and Mud may as well be his career mark for him in terms of performance.

What I like about this film is that it is not really a complex mystery, in fact, it is relatively simple on the whole but the way it falls together so naturally between Matthew McConaughey and that one boy Ellis. This movie is pretty much Ellis as he is the main character and has this whole coming of age story which is nice. It shows this thirteen year old, from his point-of-view, of what true love is really like and the hardships that go along with it. One thing you got to understand about Matthew McConaughey is that out of every role that he has played over the years there are only two he is phenomenal at. Playing a lawyer and playing a freeloading bum. Another reason why I liked this movie is that it is a bit of a film noir where there's some nefarious shit going on and it is not brought on to you right away. Reese Witherspoon appears around half into the movie as Mud's girlfriend and she becomes this person that is sort of like a question mark changing things in Ellis' head about how he thinks about women. She is sort of the pivot point and the moral ambiguities of this story. Your heart goes out to this kid but, at the same time, there's not much else you can do about it because he has to figure this sort of thing out for himself. The real tragic thing about this movie is that Michael Shannon is in this, but he plays more of a cameo. When he popped up onscreen I was expecting a bigger role from him especially when you think that he would have some sort of confrontation with Mud, but that never happens. There are also several other big actors who play small roles and they are all perfectly laid into the film. This movie has a lot of emotion from all different points of characters which into this big conflict near the end which puts you at the edge of your seat. Overall, I thoroughly enjoy the hell out of this and Jeff Nichols sure does know how to direct the story and actors into making one awesome romance flick. This is unquestionably a five star rating.