Since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) recently awarded their Academy Awards of Merit, known more familiarly as the Oscars, Netflix has a grouping of films that have either won or were nominated.  I may not always agree with their selections, but one can be at least reasonably assured that they are quality productions.  Because they are there now, I figure I might as well take advantage of the situation while they are present.  I must also confess to being increasingly drawn to stories of people standing up to injustice.  Sadly, there has been a lot of that in this country, and there continues to be ample examples of cruelty within our borders and beyond.  There are also lots of ways of combatting such ignorance.  While I often want to ball my fists in anger and shout my rage, my Faith provides a different path.  That does not mean that people who do otherwise for the right cause, such as protecting the weak against the strong, do so in error.  Only God can judge the merits of each reaction.  For these reasons, I appreciate Mudblood (2017), and I hope you do as well.

By the way, I hope you also appreciate rain, and it should come as no surprise with a title like Mudbound that the first scene features lots of it.  It is just after World War II in the Mississippi Delta and brothers Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke), and his younger sibling Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund), are digging a hole in a torrential downpour for their recently deceased father, Pappy McAllan (Jonathan Banks).  In the morning, we see a physically beaten Jamie, along with Henry and his wife, Laura McAllan (Carey Mulligan), take the coffin out to the now dry grave.  As they ponder how they will lower the rough pine casket, Hap Jackson (Rob Morgan), and his family are passing in a horse drawn cart.  The air is tense between the African American Jacksons and the white McAllans, and this is not simply because this is the height of the Jim Crow South.  Much of the rest of the film is flashback from this point on in order to tell us how we get to this moment.  It begins in 1939 when Henry meets Laura, and they agree to get married.  During their courtship, Henry has Laura meet the college educated Jamie.  There is a recognizable connection between Jamie and Laura, but Henry warns that his younger brother is a bit of a philanderer.  Though she is charmed by Jamie, her desire is for domestic happiness, and Henry offers the better option.  Everything changes in 1941 when the United States enters World War II.  Jamie joins the United States Army Air Corps (there was no separate branch for the Air Force at that time) as a pilot in a B-25 bomber.  Shortly after this, and without telling Laura, Henry decides to move them and their two young children to a farm in the Mississippi Delta.  He had promised her a lovely, four-room house to go with the spread.  Instead, being swindled out of that arrangement, they end up taking over a tenancy amongst the sharecroppers.  This is when they first meet the Jacksons, whose oldest son, Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell), is serving in the Army as a sergeant in command of a tank.  Hap is not pleased by their sudden appearance of these new neighbors, having hoped to purchase the same land at some point in the future.  As for Henry, though he is not overtly racist, he treats the Jackson with the kind of offhand racism that was so infuriatingly common in that era.  Laura has a different view on them, especially after Hap’s wife, Florence Jackson (Mary J. Blige), helps the McAllans when their children are afflicted with the whooping cough.  In return, Laura offers Florence a job working around the McAllan household.  Despite Hap’s objections, Florence accepts, citing their need to earn more money to achieve her husband’s dream of owning their own land.  Also, against Henry’s objections, Laura lends the Jacksons money when Hap breaks his leg, paying for a proper doctor to treat the injury.  Life settles into somewhat of a pattern until the war ends and Jamie and Ronsel return home.  They are haunted by their experience fighting in Europe, coming back different people.  The heroic treatment Ronsel received overseas is not replicated in Mississippi, and he has trouble adjusting.  Jamie cannot shake the death of his co-pilot during combat and drinks heavily.  He is also troubled by Pappy, who scorns the fact that he killed people from 20,000 feet in the air instead of looking them in the eye.  Jamie and Ronsel are the only two in town to have known war, and they form a friendship based on camaraderie.  They share things with one another that they cannot with others, like the fact that Ronsel had fathered a child with a white woman in Germany.  Jamie, though, does not discuss his continued attraction to Laura, but suggests that his friend return to Europe.  He is about to leave town, too, spurred on by a falling out with Henry over Jamie’s alcohol abuse.  As Jamie tells Ronsel about this development, his friend shows off the picture of his child.  At that same moment, Pappy drives past in another car, seeing Ronsel in the front seat before the African American has a chance to duck out of sight.  Later that night, after making love to Laura when he says he is departing, Jamie is awakened in the middle of the night by Pappy and a couple other men in Ku Klux Klan robes.  Jamie is taken to a barn where Ronsel is in the process of being lynched, Pappy having also found the picture of Ronsel’s new family.  Jamie grabs a gun to defend his friend, but is overwhelmed and rendered unconscious.  When he comes to, there is a pistol to his head and he is being told that he must choose the instrument of Ronsel’s defigurement or be killed.  Jamie opts for Ronsel’s tongue being cut out.  When Jamie gets home, he smothers Pappy, which brings us back to the beginning.

With cuckolding, lynching, and patricide, Mudbound sounds awful.  Luckily, and to this Catholic’s satisfaction, this is not how it ends.  The message it chooses to leave us with is self-consciously focused on love.  Jamie departs having stood up for the right thing (despite playing the paramour), the McAllans finally get their land, and Ronsel returns to Germany.  It is always good to be reminded about love.  God knows how much I need such reminders, particularly in our world today.  Faith tells us that we are to love abundantly, without reservation, even our enemies.  Admittedly, I find that hard to do when it comes to those who choose evil.  One can make an exception, for example, for the one who steals a loaf of bread to feed their family.  It does not take away from the fact that a sin is committed, but one can understand the motivation.  I get the most incensed when it comes to bigotry.  There was a time in my life when I would have said that I hate the Klan. “Hate” is a strong word, but I felt strongly about them.  To do the kinds of things you see in a film like this one are an anathema to me, and I want to do something about it.  Faith has brought me to a different point of view, one that sees the wound that brings one to sin while still despising the act.  It is not easy, but prayer gives me the strength to continue.  This brings me to Jamie’s act of defiance.  His behavior is also tinged by woundedness.  I do not love the fact that he drinks excessively and covets his brother’s wife, but his experiences in the war partially explain his behavior.  The night of the lynching, he has a bravery born of self-loathing, but it is enough for him to do the right thing.  God seldom picks perfect people to do extraordinary things.  If He did, nothing would ever get accomplished.  What we see here are flawed people doing their best when put into awful circumstances.  That is all God asks of us, especially when it is hard.

What is not hard is recommending Mudbound.  There is a little bit of nudity and swearing in it, and the lynching scene is fairly graphic.  I also fear I might have described Laura in a harsher light than she deserves.  She is another that does the best she can, though she is hampered by a husband that does not love her in the same way she does him.  I pray that we never have to revisit the societal issues you see in this movie.  Hopefully this review of a really good movie will help with that cause.