Mud

Mud – A baffling misfire, every aspect of this movie is strangely false, obtuse, and dull.  Two boys who are friends live on the bayous at a place called DeWitt, Arkansas.  On an island in the Mississippi River, a boat is stranded in a tree, an artifact of floodwaters.  When the boys explore the suspended boat, they encounter a man with a gun who seems to be hiding-out on the island.  This man calls himself Mud and he has killed someone while defending his girlfriend.  The fugitive enlists the boys’ help in communicating with his girlfriend, a slutty blonde who is living in a motel in DeWitt.  After a serious of tedious adventures, the dead man’s father and a posse of bad guys come to town to kill Mud.  An improbable bloodbath ensues and Mud, with his buddy, a former CIA assassin and sniper, escape down the river to the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the two adolescent boys from whose perspective the story is told sadder, but wiser.  Matthew McConnaughy squints a lot and makes weird pronouncements in his Texas drawl – he plays the part of Mud and is the best thing about the movie.  Sam Shepherd is the CIA assassin who guns down most of the bad guys in the completely predictable climax to the film.  Reese Witherspoon, cast against type, plays Mud’s promiscuous and dim-witted girlfriend – Legally Blonde this is not.  Michael Shannon is wasted in a small role as a guy who wanders around in the depths of the Big Muddy in improvised diving gear searching for river-pearls.  (Presumably, he was going to play a part in the ridiculously violent climax to the movie, arising from the deep like Ned Kelly in his bullet-proof diving bell, but, apparently, the film makers, after heaping implausibility upon impossibility, decided against this effect.  My guess is that something like this was filmed but looked so absurd that it had to be cut out of the movie – we see Shannon underwater during the climax of the film.  What he is doing at night on the bottom of the river is unclear.)  The curious thing about this film is that it is a prestige-piece, made with good acting, and very atmospheric location photography – apparently, the picture was shot on location in DeWitt and the local color is flawless and fairly interesting.  Thus, everything looks realistic, but the whole movie is completely contrived, unbelievable, freighted with needless complications and way, way too long – the thing clocks in at about 2 hours and 20 minutes, the length of The Master, but with nothing like the gravitas required for a film of this length.  Indeed, the chief complaint to lodge against this picture is that it is boring, not just a little boring, but massively, impressively dull – there are endlessly repeated shots of the boys riding around on their motorbikes (are 14 year-olds on motorcycles street-legal in Arkansas?) or cruising the bayou swamps.  Mud sends the boys on interminable missions, fetching him food, sending messages to his lady-love, etc.  And the film maker, apparently having lost confidence in the material, expands the movie with pointless subplots – the rather effeminate and pretty boy-hero fancies a Senior girl who is mean to him, a clutch of cotton-mouths bite the boy and he almost dies (he is saved by Mud in a scene right out of True Grit); the young hero’s parents are getting divorced and the boy is about to loose his house (they live on a picturesque house-boat); Mud’s girlfriend betrays him; and on and on.  The subplots don’t contribute to the film’s main narrative – the bad guys stalking Mud – and merely add unnecessary time to the picture.  On paper, this film probably seemed like a good idea:  it’s like Winter’s Bone set on the bayou – a teenager must try to save his family’s home and the adults are all crazy, drugged-up, or missing in action.  Rural Arkansas looks picturesquely squalid and the hillbilly milieu impressed audiences in Winter’ Bone.  But Winter’s Bone felt remarkably true-to-life and accurate – even in such Gothic scenes as a woman using a chainsaw to cut off the hands of a corpse – while nothing about Mud is in the least bit believable.  (This film’s failure is particularly surprising because the director, Jeff Nichols, made the excellent Take Shelter and is an important new talent in the Indy film world.  My distaste for this film is a distinctly minority opinion – mainstream critics have been wildly enthusiastic about this picture.)