LOVING – Review

Ruth Negga (left) stars as Mildred and Joel Edgerton (right) stars as Richard in Jeff
Nichols LOVING, a Focus Features release. Photo credit: Ben Rothstein / Focus Features. © Focus Features

LOVING is wonderful, warmly romantic drama about the couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, whose Supreme Court case struck down laws that prevented interracial couples from marrying. Although the court case is part of the story, the film is really about the couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, childhood sweethearts whose deeply romantic love story is the heart of this excellent, touching film.

Jeff Nichols (TAKE SHELTER, MUD, MIDNIGHT SPECIAL) directs this fine, realistic, gentle romance story, with fine performances by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as the couple. The couple’s beautiful love story is the heart of this film.

Audiences expecting a courtroom drama and in-depth legal discussions about the pivotal Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case may be surprised by LOVING. The couple and their story have already been the focus of a hit documentary, THE LOVING STORY. This film is different – at heart, a deeply-moving romance, beautifully photographed and wonderfully acted.

The strength of this film is that it is a love story, told with a directness and wrapped in warm, lovely photography that emphasizes the peaceful rural setting and images of an old-fashioned home. The Lovings were not activists, and in fact they resisted the idea of being at the center of a court battle. All they wanted was a quiet life. They were just two ordinary people who fell in love; the problem was they happened to be different races. Richard was white and Mildred was black and Native American, which made their marriage a violation of the anti-miscegenation laws, laws that banned interracial marriage, in their home state of Virginia and throughout the South in 1958.

The small rural community where Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter grew up was unlike most other places in Virginia, a state that was racial segregated like the rest of the South and barred marriage between blacks and whites. But in the tiny, poor rural community of Central Point there was little difference between the lives of whites and blacks and the community had long had a history of whites and blacks together mixing freely. Interracial relationships were not uncommon, even little noted. The difference was Richard Loving, a religious man, wanted to marry the woman he loved, not just live with her, and have their children born in wedlock and raised together by their married parents. Since interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. to marry quietly and then returned to Central Point to begin their life together. No one minded in the community but the state of Virginia did.

Negga is luminous as Mildred, a woman whose dewy beauty and sweetness capture our hearts quickly. The Ireland-raised, Ethiopia-born Negga nails Mildred’s soft Southern accent and plays the part brilliantly, so that Mildred’s sweet, sparkling personality shines through, making us see why Richard fell in love with her. The couple’s close, affectionate relationship was illustrated in a famous series of photos published in Life Magazine, then a major cultural force, during the court battle, a photo shoot that is recreated to great effect in the film. Australian actor Edgerton, who also manages the accent well, plays Richard as a reserved, simple man, a kind of classic cowboy type and a “man of few words” who would do anything for his wife and to defend their life together.

And there is much to defend. Soon after they are married, the authorities learn of it and they are both arrested. Richard is quickly released but authorities refuse to let him bail out his wife, insisting her parents do that instead. Convicted of being married and barred by a plea agreement from living together in Virginia, the Lovings move to Washington, D.C. where their marriage is legal. But,as life-long country people, they are unhappy with urban life in a few years and long for family and friends back home. They return in secret to Central Point, in violation of court order.

It is their longing for their home that drives them to court. By keeping the focus on the couple, writer/director Jeff Nichols paints a moving portrait of a couple who just want to live a simple, quiet life surrounded by family and friends in the rural community where they grew up. The simplicity of that wish resonates in its universal humanity.

Cinematographer Adam Stone brings an eye for lush, natural world and the beauty in ordinary objects to the film, in fine photography that enhances the film’s themes of home and family. The rural locations are shot in lush, green beauty, the simple country homes having a warm and dignity that suggests that roots run deep here. Richard’s mother serves as the local midwife, delivering babies for both black and white. Richard’s best friends are black, sharing his enthusiasm for drag racing and fixing cars, and he works side by side with both races as a bricklayer. Everything about their community is shot surrounded by the natural world, while their life in urban D.C. is all traffic, noise and dusty, rumble-strewn streets.

Director Jeff Nichols brings out the hardship and strain that playing out their private battle in very public fashion in the court placed on the couple, particularly Richard, a reticent man who would prefer to avoid the spotlight. Nichols has shown a knack for telling stories about individuals under siege, and now The authorities trying to impose ideas of segregation are the villains.

Fine acting fills this film, with nice work in supporting roles as well as the leads. Michael Shannon, who worked with the director on TAKE SHELTER and other films, plays Grey Villet, the photographer who shot the striking Life Magazine photos. Marton Csokas (BOURNE SUPREMACY) plays Sheriff Brooks, a key enforcer of rules, and David Jensen plays Judge Bazile, who cites a then-common religious argument for racial separation. Nick Kroll and Jon Bass play a pair of young ACLU lawyers, Bernie Cohen and Phil Hirshkop, who persuade the very private couple to let them take the case to the Supreme Court. The film captures the reticence of the couple as well as their devotion to each other. After the court’s decision, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws and established a right to marry cited in the gay marriage case, the couple retreated to raise their three children quietly and rarely gave interviews.

The film is really about the couple, and their personal story, rather than the legal battle that toppled laws barring interracial marriages. Court scenes are few, and legal discussion nearly absent. Instead we get a portrait of a couple under siege and even on the run for wanting to do something very ordinary, being married. At one point, even family question all the risk and difficulty brought by Richard’s steadfast wish to be married to Mildred, chiding him for making their union legal.

LOVING is a warm, moving, deeply romantic film, about the loving couple whose wish to be together as husband and wife was the focal point of the Supreme Court case that established marriage as a fundamental right.

RATING: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars