An early and serious contender for 2017’s Best Picture is a movie that may not have found its way to a theater had it not garnered so much critical acclaim. Dee Rees’s (Pariah) Mudbound is a Netflix original movie, and had it not been for The Academy of Motion Pictures’ rule of all Oscar-nominated films be available to the public via movie theaters, who knows where it would have landed. This is not Netflix’s first movie to receive so much praise that the movie had to be released in the theaters. 2015’s Beasts of No Nation faced a similar fate. However, the kudos that Beasts of No Nation originally received faded as Oscar season approached, and the movie ultimately did not receive a single nomination. The same won’t be the case for Mudbound, which very well could earn a Best Picture nomination as well as nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Jason Mitchell Detroit, Straight Outta Compton), Best Supporting Actress (Mary J. Blige), and Best Adapted Screenplay just to name a few. Of course, it’s an early prediction, and I have yet to see any of the other contenders, but this does feel like a poor year for movies. I would be shocked if Mudbound is not nominated for Best Picture, and I would be surprised if it doesn’t win at least one award in one of the other categories before cinema’s biggest night of the year is complete.

Mudbound takes place during the time of World War II. It is set almost entirely in rural Mississippi Delta farmland, with quick scenes cut in now and then to show two of the supporting actors fighting for the Allied Forces in Europe. In just her second directorial effort, Rees (who also wrote the screenplay) is masterful in so many different areas that I truly believe that if this movie is not nominated for Best Picture, it will be the biggest snub of 2017. Rees excels at (where a lesser director would most undoubtedly fail) getting us connected with so many different characters. It’s ambitious to tell so many different stories, regardless of how much they are intertwined. Often the result is a complete disaster. Not so with Rees, who narrates the story of two families, each struggling to survive, each in need of another but, at the same time, set against one another by callous society because one family is white and the other black. I’ll discuss this later in this review. In addition to excelling at getting us deeply connected to more than a dozen characters, Rees further demonstrates her genius by developing characters so deep and rich that it often becomes difficult to tell which characters are good and which characters are evil all the way through the very end. The writers and directors of HBO’s Game of Thrones do a brilliant job with this as well. Just when you think you know a character, the character changes in so drastic yet believable ways. The difference is Game of Thrones is seven seasons worth of ten hour-long episodes. Rees told her story in just under two and a half hours. Finally, what Rees knocked out of the park was the seductively tragic nature of her film. Some moments are breathtakingly beautiful and ones just minutes later that are gutwrenching and extremely difficult to watch.

But Rees’s direction wasn’t the only thing going with this film. The story flowed perfectly, beginning with Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke – Everest, Lawless) and his brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund – Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Unbroken) burying their father in the first scene. We don’t know how, when, where, or why he died, but we soon learn this is a flashforward scene. We are then taken back to 1939, where Henry, to improve the situation of his wife Laura (Carey Mulligan – Shame, Drive) and two children, moves the family from everything they know in a quiet suburb of Memphis for the brutal farmlands of Mississippi. They are totally unprepared for life on a farm. This is coupled with the fact that the house he thought he had put a down payment on was actually sold to him by a con artist who had no rights on the land. Henry discovers he’s been swindled, and Laura finds herself living in a run-down shack on the land without electricity or running water, where her only luxury is one hot bath a week. Henry, Laura, and their two children are Henry’s father, Pappy (Jonathan Banks – AMC’s Breaking Bad). Pappy is an angry old man, hellbent on thinking that the ways of the past should be the ways of the future. He is a full-blown racist, full of pure hate. He’s the type of man who will side with a white person over a black person, regardless of the situation. Heck, he wouldn’t even need to know what the situation was. He follows his son to Mississippi because, frankly, he has nowhere else to go. Henry and Jamie are both extensions of him. Each feels entitled to something more, at least in a certain sense. It’s difficult at times to know if Henry is a full-blown racist like his father or if he is just nicer and softer about it and maybe adhering to society’s norms rather than his own beliefs. Still, we can decipher that he believes black people are still people and still have value and convey emotions as white people do. Again, it is Rees doing a masterful job of not allowing us to know a character perfectly or wholly. Just as complexing is Jamie, a womanizer from the very start. It becomes clear to the audience that he has every desire to get into Laura’s pants practically as soon as the two meet. Henry himself is the only one who doesn’t seem keen on it (or maybe he is, and we aren’t aware of it). But Jamie becomes much richer than the character we are first introduced to. 

The second family is the Jackson family. The Jackson’s are living in equally wretched poverty. Preacher Hap Jackson (Rob Morgan – Shelter, Wetlands) is a sharecropper, laboring over hundreds of acres of land that he knows he will never own. His wife Florence (Blige) helps plow the fields and raises their children while working as Laura’s maid. Their oldest son Ronsel (Mitchell), is more progressive than his parents because he doesn’t just want to roll over for the white people. The film follows the Jacksons and the McAllans through tragedy and turmoil, their fates connected through various threads of circumstance, none of which are rushed, but some of which seem to be pushed maybe a little too hard.

Mudbound is deft in its storytelling, hooking us early with lush characters, some of whom are very different by the end. The Mississippi backdrop is offset by scenes set in World War II Germany, which show two characters being changed by their experiences. Each comes back mentally scarred but with a different attitude toward the world. The movie is dazzling at times and heartwrenching at others, and you’ll go back and forth between cheering and weeping. We are mere witnesses to Rees’s narrative, hoping for certain things to happen but knowing that what we expect might not occur. Nevertheless, it’s a ride worth experiencing.

Plot 10/10
Character Development 9.5/10
Character Chemistry 9/10
Acting 9/10
Screenplay 10/10
Directing 10/10
Cinematography 9.5/10
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 9/10
Universal Relevance 9/10
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