I just finished watching this excellent film on Netflix called Mudbound. I was going to purchase a rental on YouTube or Google like I usually do, but I had been wanting to see Mudbound for a while. I read it several years ago, I can’t remember exactly when, but I think it was around the time that the movie had come out and I wanted to read the book before watching the movie. The writing by Hillary Jordan, the author of the novel, was incredible and the story was also powerful. I can see why the movie got critical acclaim, because the film was excellent, and it gave me chills by the end credits. It wasn’t an easy film to sit through, but that is because watching racial trauma and also war trauma is never easy to watch. I remember watching Mary J. Blige perform a song on the movie’s soundtrack called “Mighty River” at the Academy Awards in 2018, and it gave me so many goosebumps. It was so uplifting and powerful. I honestly love Mary J. Blige and all that she has done during her career. I remember watching a performance she did at the Grammys last year for her song “Good Morning Gorgeous.” I had not heard the song yet, but the performance was so beautiful and man, I just got chills all up and down my spine watching her belt out and sing. I also loved the square-shaped cellos that the musicians were playing for the accompaniment because I am a cello player and always get so excited when I see classical musicians play at these hot events like the Grammys or the Golden Globes when the pianist Chloe Flower played.
The movie takes place in rural Mississippi during the 1940s, and it opens with two white men lowering a casket in a ditch. One of the white men, Henry, asks a Black family riding past if they can help him with digging the casket into the ditch. The movie shows the events leading up to this. Laura McAllan meets Henry McAllan when he comes to dine with her family. Henry has a brother named Jamie, who is also keen on Laura but is also kind of a player, so Henry warns her about Jamie flirting with her. Henry and Laura marry, and they have two daughters together. However, everything changes when Henry decides to move the family into a new house so that he can take care of his grandpa, Pappy. Laura is upset because Henry didn’t tell her that he signed the lease on the house, but she goes with him, and they pack up their things and head over to their new home. However, when they get there, it turns out that they got conned out of the arrangement and another man lives there, so the family is forced to live in a dilapidated shack outside of Marietta, Mississippi, near a Black sharecropping family, the Jacksons. Hap Jackson and his wife, Florence Jackson, are eating with their family one day, when Henry loudly bangs on the door and asks Henry if he can help his family get their stuff into their new place. Pappy is racist and make a lot of derogatory remarks towards Hap, and even though Henry and Laura try to ignore it, Pappy’s racism evolves into something much worse over the course of the movie. Laura has Florence come to work for her, and at first when Florence tells Hap about this, he tells her that she doesn’t have to work for this white woman and that they are fine doing their work sharecropping. However, Florence ends up working for Laura and even helping her when Laura has a miscarriage.
Meanwhile, Henry’s brother, Jamie, is fighting in the Air Corps during World War II. Ronsel, who is Hap and Florence’s son, also enlists in the U.S. Army. Even though both of them work in separate units, they experience the same trauma and disillusionment with their time fighting overseas, especially when they come back home. When he comes back home, Jamie struggles with alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder, and wakes up frequently from nightmares about the horrors he experienced while fighting in the war. One evening, Jamie is sitting with Pappy and Henry drinking and talking about his time in the war, and Pappy asks him how many German soldiers he killed. Jamie doesn’t want to talk about that, and Pappy thinks he is weak for not admitting how many he killed. This leaves Jamie feeling ashamed. In one scene, Jamie is helping out in the shed with his brother, Henry, but he is intoxicated and knocks over Henry’s pail of milk. Henry accuses Jamie of being careless, and tells him Jamie has no self-worth because he came home from the war acting like he was too good for farmwork, but he isn’t better than any of his family members. Jamie insults him and his family and Henry beats him up and tells him he needs to leave and get out of town. Similarly, Ronsel really enjoyed not facing a lot of racism in Europe, and when he comes back to life as a sharecropper, he finds the work degrading and is disillusioned that he doesn’t receive the same respect when he comes back home, even after serving in the war.
While in Europe, Ronsel falls in love with a white German woman and doesn’t experience the same kind of racism that he experienced in the United States. However, in one scene, when he returns home to get some groceries from the store, he tries to leave through the front entrance. However, Pappy and Henry confront him and tell him he can’t go through the front entrance because he is Black, and Ronsel informs them that in Europe, Black men were treated with respect, and they got to exit through the front doors. He leaves them stunned, and Henry confronts Hap and Florence about Ronsel speaking to his grandpa in a way that made it seem like he was talking back to white people. One day, Jamie is coming back from the same store and when he hears a car engine go past him, he drops his groceries and ducks because he thinks it is a fighter jet. He is recalling the traumatic event of when his fellow pilot was killed in the air while they were flying the plane. Ronsel sees him and helps him up, and the white men on the porch outside the store give him hostile looks. However, Jamie introduces himself to Ronsel and gives him a ride in his truck, and they ride back home and talk about the war and their experiences. They build a deep friendship, which is rare considering the time and the place that they live in. Ronsel develops so much trust in Jamie that he shows him a picture of the white woman he married in Germany and the child she bore after he left to go home. However, it comes at a huge price when Pappy finds out that Jamie has been talking to Ronsel and giving him rides, and Pappy rouses Jamie from sleep and leads him to a shed where members of the Ku Klux Klan have brutally beaten and tied up Ronsel after finding out that he fathered a child with the white woman in Germany, and they also beat Jamie for defending Ronsel. Jamie tries to shoot Pappy, but Pappy has the Klan members beat Jamie and then Pappy has Jamie choose whether Ronsel gets one of his body parts mutilated or is put to death. It was a horrific scene, and it reminded me once again of the degradation and dehumanization of Black people during this time of Jim Crow segregation. It reminded me of this movie I saw called Till, which is a biopic about the murder of Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago who was brutally murdered in Mississippi for speaking to a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. The thing that really shook me about the movie (and which will remain in my psyche for quite some time) was the scene where Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, mourns over her son’s mutilated corpse during an autopsy and when she has his casket left open so that everyone who attended his funeral can see how badly these men beat and mutilated Emmett’s body. Growing up, I always saw the photo of Emmett Till while he was alive, but I had never seen the photo of his corpse. And I was afraid to at the time, to be quite frank, but growing up my parents and ancestors lived through the time of Emmett Till, so they didn’t have a choice to look away because I’m sure it was all over the news. Even though the biopic Till is a historical drama, the makeup and prosthetics team made the body of Emmett Till very realistic looking, so when I finally saw Emmett’s body onscreen, it was disturbing to watch but also necessary for me to watch because otherwise I would have spent my whole life not knowing the extent to how brutal the murder of Emmett Till was and why Mamie had every right to keep speaking out against the injustice done to her son. I could feel Mamie Till’s grief and pain at the brutal and gross injustice done to her son, and even though it was extremely hard to sit through the wake scene and the autopsy scene, seeing those scenes reminded me how brutal racism against African Americans was during that time. Seeing Ronsel’s brutally beaten and mutilated body during this disturbing scene in Mudbound reminded me of how white people didn’t see Black people as human beings and went to great lengths to police their bodies and disenfranchise them. It was hard to watch, but it also showed me how virulent Pappy’s racism was. He was willing to go to great lengths to tear apart Ronsel and Jamie’s friendship, and it was painful to watch. It also showed me how much courage it took for Jamie and Ronsel to even be friends at the time and have these vulnerable conversations with each other, because through getting to know each other they realized that even during a time when white people and Black people used separate fountains and couldn’t integrate with one another without being punished, Jamie and Ronsel found similarities in each other’s shared experiences with fighting in the war, and through this shared experience they create a powerful bond with one another.
Another intense scene was when Hap falls off the roof of a house he is repairing and breaks his leg. This is interspersed with scenes where his son, Ronsel, is in the war and has to exit a tank that is going to explode, and one of his fellow soldiers gets severely injured and he is trying to find help, but no one comes. This is a suspenseful scene, especially with the church hymn playing in the background. Earlier, Hap is giving a sermon to a Black congregation in a shed, and then he injures his leg. It is painful, but because Florence helped out Laura when her daughters had whooping cough, Laura wants to return the favor, so she goes into Henry’s money stash and gets out money to pay for a doctor to treat Hap’s leg wound. Earlier, Henry expects Hap to get back to work even after Hap’s leg hasn’t healed yet, but when Hap tries to get up, he falls down again, further injuring his leg. But when Laura gets him the help he needs, he is able to work again and provide for his family. When he in bed, injured, he feels a sense of shame that he can’t be in a position to help out his family, especially because his wife is also juggling work for the McAllan family and sharecropping. Also, sharecropping is another huge theme in this movie. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation was supposed to free Black people from slavery, Black people continued to deal with disenfranchisement in other forms, one of them being sharecropping. Many Black people in the Deep South had few financial resources, so they had to continue working to provide for their families. So even after the Emancipation Proclamation, systemic racism still remained as an institution to continue to disempower Black people. Not only does the Jackson family work as sharecroppers but they also have to deal with racial trauma and also the brutal beating of their son, Ronsel.
Although in the movie they do show a white family who were sharecroppers working for Henry. In one scene Carl is about to lose his job after Henry loses one of his mules, and his wife, Vera, has to ask Laura that she and her husband can keep their jobs. Laura says that is out of her power and only Henry can make that decision. Later on, Vera appears pregnant, and at this time, Laura is also pregnant. Laura is excited when she finds out she is pregnant, but then when Vera approaches her, she finds Vera is distraught and has a knife. She asks Laura to drive her into town, but Laura tells her she can’t drive her into town because she got in trouble with her husband last time for driving (I assume it’s because she drove the doctor into town to help Hap with his leg and Henry is angry with her, so he got back at her by letting her not drive anymore.) But Vera fires back at her, telling her she has seen Laura driving. Vera then breaks down crying, and Laura reveals to the audience that Vera stabbed Carl to death. Vera’s situation reminded me how difficult the circumstances must have been for sharecropping families, both white and black, during this time.
Overall, this was an excellent film. Also, Carey Mulligan is an incredible actress. I love her movies, and she was really good in this one. I also didn’t realize this until later, but I remember reading a Buzzfeed review from 2021 by Nicholas Braun, who starred in this movie called Zola, and he mentioned working with one of the actors in Zola, Jason Mitchell, who plays a character in the film named Dion. Jason Mitchell is the actor who plays Ronsel in Mudbound. I also checked Wikipedia and realized I recognized him in this movie called Detroit, which is another excellent film. Also, the music in Mudbound is absolutely brilliant. I loved the film score.
Mudbound. 2017. Directed by Dee Rees. Rated R for some disturbing violence, brief language and nudity.
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