Mud (2012) and the Shipwreck of Southern Masculinity

Mud (Jeff Nichols, 2012)
Few contemporary filmmakers have nailed an atmospheric sense of place as certainly as Jeff Nichols has.  The South in Mud is dirty, ragged, barely welded together by a guy in a garage, but it still runs.  That's not the whole picture, and Nichols doesn't pretend it is, but it is the existential reality of these particular characters.  They continue to embrace it and therein find their identity.  "I ain't no townie," Ellis tells his dad when told he will be moving to town after his parents split up.  His dad understands but finds himself helpless to do anything different.  Matter of fact, it looks like he's always found himself a little overwhelmed by the basic responsibilities of life.
Talking.  
Loving.  
Giving.  
Listening.  
These aren't things Senior is particularly good at.  
And soon he will pass a lineage of brooding silence onto his boy.
Ellis is a romantic.  It's easy to figure Senior probably was too, once.  He will learn the way of his father through heartbreak.

The most evocative shot in the film.  The stoicism of the southern male exemplified.  

There is a father with his back to his child.  He lives on the river but he doesn't have a boat. He sees his son becoming like himself.  He can't stop it.  Doesn't try.  Who is he to try?  Beat down, defeated, lost.

There are worse patterns out there, perhaps.  King and his sons are proactive.  King seeks to avenge the death of his son.  But is being misguided truly better than being passive?  Praying to God to aid in the illegal capture and killing of a man just to justify yourself and your effort?  There's a comment about southern evangelicalism buried here but Nichols' can't explore it because he doesn't know how.  For now, it must simply color the atmosphere.

Helplessness runs throughout, but it is the helplessness of these set patterns.  Mud's dilemma is his own doing, Senior and Mary Lee's marriage is unsurprisingly doomed, Ellis' relationship with May Pearl will follow a similar pattern.  
Can these patterns ever be broken?  
Is this just the nature of poverty, of immaturity, the imprisonment of place?  
Is this the shipwreck of southern masculinity?

Insecurity objectified by the accumulation of masculine artifacts.  For Mud, it is a clean white shirt, a loaded pistol and a boat in a tree.

Whether on a deserted river island or in a hospital surrounded by suspicious on-lookers, Mud is a character without a place.  He looks at home nowhere because his home is nowhere.  

The wide flat vistas.  The cheap construction nearby.  The rusted belly of a car or a boat.  A toolshed that is never used.  It just collects.

This is not a great film but it knows where it belongs, even if it takes too long to get there.  It doesn't speak as clearly as it could, maybe that is all part of it.  You have to embrace it for seeing something honest.  Is it honest?  Is it real? I don't know.  Even if you question whether the guy telling you the story is full of it you don't care because the story is pretty good and you like him.  Why not?  Is the pattern in me?  Is this it right now?

Endless cycles of bitterness and resentment.  The dangers of unconfined bodies of water.
Maybe the prisons are the places, the ideas, the atmospheres, the patterns.  
Maybe if they could just get away everything would be better.

But where can they go?  Where can you go to get away from yourself?

[film journal: 11.23.2013]