Mud

Two fourteen-year-old boys take a motorboat down the Mississippi to an island and find a boat in a tree. That image, a cabin cruiser wedged in the branches by a flood, is where Jeff Nichols starts Mud, and it is the best idea in the film. Nichols had made two films before this, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, both tight and anxious, and this is the one where he lets the light in. It is a good film, and for about ninety minutes we thought it might be better than that.

Richard A. Wright’s production design gives the boat real weight in the tree, moss on the hull and a proper mess inside, and Adam Stone shoots it first from below, so the keel hangs over the boys like a roof they have been promised. We felt what they felt, which is that this thing must be ours. Then a man steps out of it. Matthew McConaughey plays Mud lean and sun-cured, a chipped tooth, a white shirt he calls lucky, a pistol he does not hide, and a way of talking about snakes and signs and his girl that is half sermon and half sales pitch. He is funny, and he is plainly not safe, and Nichols keeps both in the frame at once.

What holds the film together is that Ellis needs Mud to be telling the truth. At home on the houseboat, Senior (Ray McKinnon) and Mary Lee (Sarah Paulson) are ending their marriage in low voices. So when Mud says he killed a man for love of Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and that she is coming for him, Ellis hears the one story on offer in which love is worth something. Tye Sheridan plays this with his chin up and his eyes worried, and he never asks us to like him. Jacob Lofland’s Neckbone gets the practical lines and delivers them as if he has been waiting his whole life to be the sensible one.

The edges are well filled. Michael Shannon, in a homemade diving helmet, gets perhaps three scenes as Galen and a laugh in each. Sam Shepard, as Tom, the old man across the river who raised Mud and would rather not talk about it, does a great deal with a rifle and a refusal. Witherspoon spends most of the film in a motel room with a bruise on her face, and Kari Perkins dresses her in cut-offs and cheap gold so that we see her exactly as a boy would and then, slowly, as a woman would. David Wingo’s score is mostly guitar and low electronics and knows when to stop. Stone keeps the river flat, brown and enormous in widescreen, and the town, when we get there, looks like somewhere the river has already half won.

Then the plot arrives, in the shape of King (Joe Don Baker) and Carver (Paul Sparks), the dead man’s father and brother, with hired men and a grudge. We will not describe what follows. What we can say is that the film stops looking and starts arranging. Julie Monroe’s cutting, patient for an hour and a half, starts moving people into position, and scenes begin to end on a character saying what the scene was about. Ellis makes several announcements about love that a boy of fourteen would think but not say aloud, and the film treats them as wisdom.

This is where the other weakness shows. Every woman in Mud is seen from Ellis’s side of the argument: the mother who is leaving, the older girl May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant) who is not as interested as he hoped, the girlfriend who may not come. The men then explain women to him, and the men doing the explaining are a fugitive and a hermit. Nichols does give Paulson one scene that pushes back, and it is a good one, but it is one scene against a whole film’s worth of boys being let down. We were irritated, and we were irritated because the first hour had earned better.

Most critics have landed roughly where we have, a little warmer. We would send you to it, with the caveat that the film you are promised in the first act is calmer and stranger than the one you get in the last. It is a 12A, and it suits a fourteen-year-old exactly. Watch it with one if you can and see which of Mud’s speeches they believe.