Mud (2013)

A fugitive named Mud (Matthew McConaughey) squats on a river island in rural Arkansas, and two fourteen-year-old boys ferry him canned goods while he repairs a flood-wrecked boat. Jeff Nichols directs this Southern Gothic coming-of-age drama with patience and a Steadicam, drawing on Mark Twain and his own Delta childhood. The result is atmospheric, unhurried, and thoroughly uninterested in instructing anyone about anything. It is a film about boys learning that adults lie, and it lets that lesson land through experience instead of announcement.

The cast is white, rural, and drawn largely from Arkansas itself, which is to say the ensemble reflects its setting without arranging itself into a statement. Women fare poorly here, though not by design: Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) drifts off with other men, and Ellis's father offers the maxim that women cannot be trusted, a sentiment the film presents as a wounded man's inheritance instead of a thesis. Race, sexuality, class warfare, climate, body image, and neurological difference are all simply absent as subjects. The River Authority wants the houseboat demolished because the paperwork says so. That is bureaucracy, not a manifesto.

What remains is craft. McConaughey inhabits the role with a twitchy, sunburned charisma, and the snake pit, the sniper fire across the water, and the demolition of the family houseboat arrive with real weight. Nichols has no sermon to deliver and no audience to correct. He wants to bottle a place and a boyhood before both wash downstream, and he mostly succeeds. A viewer searching for contemporary social instruction will find the cupboard bare, and will have to settle for a very good film instead.

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