Mud

You need to see Mud. It’s a movie in a pure sense. It's a movie like The Sound and the Fury is a book. It latches onto timeless characteristics of good movies and rides them through a story worth being told. You could say it’s a classic American story and a classic American movie. Classic implies having been done before. Classic also implies having been done right. It’s true that this story has been told before and that it's already been done right.  Mud is worth seeing cause it too has been done right. 

Any good American novel is proof that being American isn’t about abiding by legacy; it’s about finding something or creating something worth telling about later. My friends and I (who all, proudly,  trace our lineage back to Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton) chased this sentiment around the woods and creeks near our homes for most of our childhood. Mud is about the snakes, both literal and figurative, that we found, ran from, and threw rocks at in those creeks and woods. 

Kids that are raised right wander around in the woods hoping to find things like boats lodged in tree canopies. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were about this drive in young boys to find cool shit in the woods. Boys that are captivated by boats in trees are also overly responsive to that insatiable desire to sit next to girls and say things that make girls smile. And ya know, these same boys, especially the ones that don’t quite ‘get’ their fathers, are all hoping to find a pistol carrying vagrant that lives in boats in trees and speaks poetically, or matter-of-factly, about the only thing worth worrying about—sitting next to that one girl, the one worth sailing off with.

Mud is about these things. Mud makes no excuses for pursuing classic. Mud, the character embodied by a tuned-in and toned-down Matthew McConaughey, and Mud the movie, know that they each have been done before.  It’s how they go about nodding to their predecessors that allows for this movie to be lauded as one of the better movies I’ve seen in a while. 

Both are not trying to convince me of anything. McConaughey and Jeff Nichols (writer and director) aren’t selling anything. They’re looking back at what’s cool about movies. They’re looking back on what’s cool about being a kid. They’re looking back on The South and America. And they’re doing all this retro stuff by telling a timeless story that’s happening now. I’m so glad Nichols did it without any tricks or slow motion (this is not Tarantino cool and supposedly he spent a couple million to shoot the last scene from a helicopter yet he threw out the footage). Nothing here is clever. Omnipresent Hollywood is held back despite some star power and budgets. Old-school story telling is let loose. And we’re left with a movie that’s got some staying power.

Mud even has a “Holy Shit!” moment. I haven’t said holy shit in a movie theater in a long time.