Mud: Creativity Through Confinement

According to Senior (Ray McKinnon), the patriarch of the family disintegrating at the center of Mud, the Arkansas river that runs both geographically and thematically through the heart of the film attracts two kinds of people: those who want to work the river and those who want to be left alone.

The former would best describe Senior and his son, Ellis (Tye Sheridan), whose simple lifestyle of selling fish from the river has supported the family and their boathouse ever since Senior's marriage to Ellis's mother, Mary Lee (Sarah Paulson). Across the river the latter can be found in Tom Blankenship (Sam Shepard), whose mere presence and weathered appearance speaks more to his past than his silence ever could.

Their lives may be simple, but these characters don't lack ideals, goals that they want to achieve, truths that they believe to be omnipresent and irrevocable. Ellis, being just a junior high student, has his heart set on making a solitary fort out a boat he and his best friend, Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), have found stuck in a tree on an island about 15 minutes upriver. Though he never explicitly states it—he's much too reserved and naive of a kid to necessarily state or understand it—Ellis also believes in love, in innocence, in the ideal of satisfaction and a happily ever after.

"Treat a girl like a princess," he's told. These are words he takes to heart, going so far as to punch a high school senior boy in the face when he sees the boy acting inappropriately towards his ideal girl, May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant). He's a bit rough around the edges, but his heart is in the right place.

When Ellis meets Mud (Matthew McConaughey) he finds a challenge to his dreams of the boat, but also living proof that love wins out in the end. Yes, Mud has already commandeered the boat for a hiding spot, but his need is more pressing. On the run from bounty hunters for killing a man, Mud has a valid excuse—love. The man he killed was physically abusing the woman he loved and the woman who loved him, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).

At first, Mud's side of the story is the only side Ellis hears, but it's also the only side he wants to hear and the side that he probably needs to hear. Back at home, his parents' marriage is falling apart and if his mother, who legally owns the boathouse on which they live, relocates, then ownership passes to the River Authority—who Senior insists will take the house apart board by board. No wonder Ellis wants to believe that there's still someone who's willing to fight for what they love. But like all stories, Mud's isn't the only side worth telling or hearing.

Simple is an appropriate word to describe the themes and execution of Mud, but that doesn't and shouldn't imply mundanity or stupidity. Instead, simplicity implies, as it did in his previous exceptional feature, Take Shelter (a remarkable example in filmmaking efficiency from writer/director Jeff Nichols) that there's a sparseness in dialogue from the characters in Mud, but what results is a creativity through confinement. Words and actions have to be effective out of a bare bones necessity. Thus, not a line, not a look, not a shot is wasted and what results is a fully fleshed out world populated by strongly defined characters with seemingly very little effort.

This Arkansas world that Nichols creates is reminiscent of titles that the Sundance Film Festival has propagated with its universally recognizable themes resonating from a slice of American geography largely ignored by film. This Arkansas landscape with its brown river, mangy trees, and affinity for cottonmouths isn't as pleasing to the eye as the bright blue skies and wide open plains of Take Shelter, but Nichols and his cinematographer Adam Stone still manage to capture the land with a peace and respect that imbues the film with an inherent order and emotional stakes. It's this gentleness and simplicity that makes any incident of violence or wrath or heartbreak all the more potent and poignant.