MUD Review: Love, Friendship, and Fucking In Scuba Gear To The Beach Boys

Love sucks.

There is no better way of putting it. I would hate to use the quote "Live, laugh, love." because there is no such phrase that is worst than that. There is nothing funny about love, and you can't really live with love because love will one day kill you.

Love is a great feeling. You love to be loved. People loved being loved by you. Nothing is more comforting than a significant other or a family member telling you how much you mean to them. It keeps people going on even the worst of days. And on the worst of days when you're tying a noose to your neck, just stop and remember that. There is always someone that loves you. I gave that to you for free.

But love can be an equally terrible feeling. There's that obsessive kind of love, when you have a crush on someone and feel really strongly about this person, yet they don't have the same feeling as you. There's that abusive kind of love, where no matter how much you love person, it just fucking kills you. And then there is that cheating kind of love, where you love the person and then you find out that she has been fucking three of your best friends and sucked off your enemy.

I've been in love many times - or at least I thought. Love is a bitch, and a slap in your face is the only way you can truly understand it. But if you need a happy story, after many failed relationships (relationSHITS is the proper term) and many crushes that never liked me back, I have been with a girl for more than two years. Couldn't be happier.

The movie that I am reviewing today, simply titled MUD, is a story that is about friendship, loyalty, and love. It's not a happy story, because if it was a happy story it wouldn't be that exciting. Instead, director/script-writer Jeff Nichols has solidified any doubt of a filmmaking career with this excellent story. There are great performances, outstanding cinematography, enticing dialogue, a super environment, and well-developed character arcs.

I give you permission to love this movie. You may kiss the bride.

Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) travel down the Mississippi River one day and come across this boat that is up in the tree. The little explorers they are climb it and discover that someone has been living up there. They run back to their boat and see the man that has been staying in the boat. His name is Mud (Matthew McConaughey).

Mud, like your reviewer, has had some rough patches with love. His backstory is as followed - one day when he was younger, he met this girl Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). Juniper saved his life one day after a snake bit him and went out of her way to take him to the emergency room. Ever since, Mud has felt like he needs her in his life to be happy. So whenever Juniper has a bad relationship with a guy, she tells Mud and Mud goes out of his way to rough the guy up.

One specific guy that he roughed up, however, pushed Juniper down the steps and killed any chance of her ever having a child again. Mud was driven mad and shot the man in cold blood. Now on the run, Mud is hiding on a patch of land off the Mississippi and hoping nobody finds him. But he has a proposal for the two boys - help him get the boat down from the tree and back into working shape and he will give them his pistol.

This simple plot has been done before, and I'm not calling MUD an original story at all. But Jeff Nichols invests a lot of time in these characters and instead of making these simple creatures, he puts so much backstory into every single character that it makes them so much more likeable. We are given heroes to root for and villains to root against.

Ellis, like every fourteen year old boy, is confused and crushing, but he believes in love. He puts all of his faith in this thing called love and nobody can change his mind. Lord knows how many times I stayed up at night wondering if this girl ever felt the way I felt about her. His parents fight all of the time and they talk about getting a divorce. His neighbor across the river, Tom Blankenship (Sam Shepard), tells him that Mud is just going crazy in love for no reason. He falls for a girl a few years older than him (Bonnie Sturdivant) who doesn't share the same feelings for him as he does to her. Yet, he still believes in such thing called love. It's something to admire truly.

Neckbone, like every OTHER fourteen year old boy, just wants to see a girl's tits and ass, which is natural too, I guess. I guess we all watched our fair share of internet sex. Neckbone never knew his parents and has lived with his Uncle (Michael Shannon), who has sex with random trashy girls to The Beach Boys "Help Me Ronda." Yet, his idea of love is totally different than Ellis. The tale of MUD is not just about love, but nature vs. nuture too.

To be honest with you, I am really happy with this film and a lot of it has to do with the character preparation. All of the loose ends in this film are tightened and secured. But where there is great screenwriting, there will be no film without its location. The location is just as much as a character as Ellis and Neckbone and Mud. Nichols has created an environment that is so small that it feels so real. At one point, Neckbone and Ellis ask each other if they have ever seen Juniper around. There is even character development on the locations!

Mud is an anti-hero, but you root for him because you know he has good intentions and he is a protector for the children. But every character has a weak spot. Ellis gets mad too easily and punches people in the face. His father (Ray McKinnon) yells a lot. Tom Blankenship has a dark past. But these are all likeable characters. They have likeable attributes to them, and their weaknesses make them more likeable because you feel for them.

The villains, however, are so easy to root against, which is really hard to say. There are bounty hunters that are after Mud, and it just so happens that the bounty hunters are the father (Joe Don Baker) and the brother (Paul Sparks) of the man that Mud killed. They follow around Juniper in the town to make sure that she isn't assisting Mud on escaping anywhere. They are so unlikeable that the first scene we ever see Paul Sparks's character is when he is beating the shit out of Reese Witherspoon's character.

This is such an odd time that this is in a film, because a man who just saved three women from being kidnapped for ten years has past history with domestic abuse. Yet we still call him a hero.

There is some excellent cinematography in this film. The cinematographer, Adam Stone, has only really DP'd (while we are on the subject of love, snicker snicker) a few films and has done a few films working as a second unit crew member. MUD really stands out and proves this guy's future in the business. Watch the nighttime scenes and, in particular, the last night time scene in the film. Beautifully lit, beautifully shot. This is textbook cinematography.

I think it is about time we start taking Matthew McConaughey seriously. No longer is he making romantic comedies without the comedy and playing one-note characters. He took a few years off, worked his craft, and is now finally playing great characters. First KILLER JOE, then MAGIC MIKE (and let's face it, he was the only GREAT part about this movie), and now MUD. He brings life to this character when it needs it the most. For now, we can only hope that he can bring more of this kind of acting to more films.

MUD is a film that will have to stand the test of time. If you watch it really closely, almost nobody uses a cell-phone, yet it takes place in 2011. The cars that are driven are older automobiles. Even some of the clothes look dated. Yet, Nichols's vision is remarkable. Every detail is accounted for. If you would compare this to another coming of age film, MUD will leave that film in the dirt.

Pun intended.