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.  

Judging Oscar: 1986

For other years completed in this project see the purple Judging Oscar links in the sidebar ----------------------->

BEST PICTURE

WINNER: Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)

Stone takes the WWII movie and puts it in Vietnam.  There are a couple of decent setpieces but overall, I don’t find anything particularly noteworthy about it apart from this being the only major Vietnam movie that was directed by an actual Vietnam veteran.  Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger are very good as the dueling Sergeants with differing philosophies of warfare and leadership, and that dynamic really is the most gripping part of the film.  This comes to a head in the film’s best scene: a tiny farming village where the distrustful GI barge in and begin to emotionally and, later, physically torture several South Vietnamese civilians because they are believed to be untrustworthy in their association with a battalion of Vietcong.  Led by the malicious Sgt. Barnes (Berenger), even Chris Taylor (Sheen) gets in on the hostilities before Sgt. Elias (Dafoe) steps in and puts an end to the madness.  It is a good scene and Stone certainly doesn’t shy away from some of the other secret realities of the war (drug use, racism, classism, disenchantment, distrust of authority), but it also doesn’t add up to much more than a slightly interesting shrug.  Thankfully, this is before Stone got swept away with his fractured patchwork aesthetic of the 90’s, so the film actually maintains a consistent point-of-view and shows some understanding of screen geography, even if it lacks the associative power of his post-JFK work.

Judging Oscar: 1994

I have recently watched or re-watched all the films nominated for Best Picture and Best Director from 1994.  I have placed a value judgment on what I saw cinematically.  I may one day have breakdowns for every year of the Oscars, but I have not gotten very far into this journey yet.  You can follow up on the years I have completed so far: 1973, 1975, 1980 and 1996.

BEST PICTURE

WINNER: Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)

If you grew up during the 90’s, you could not escape Forrest Gump.  It was inevitable.  In my world, it was universally loved and I confess I have been systematically predisposed to like this movie ever since I saw it in the theater at age 11.  Maybe it is the desire to “get to my roots” through popular cinema (boomer parents, small southern hometown), maybe its because the soundtrack was on repeat for years in my room, maybe its because I related to Gump in a way I related to few other movie characters.  Whatever the case, I have loved this film since childhood and when I watch it today, I find I still love it and that it only deepens as I examine the movie closer.  Whatever the major effect the film had on American culture at large, I see in the film a unique skewering of American exceptionalism through the narrative of a guileless individual who is shamelessly exploited by a variety of individuals and social institutions yet maintains a loyalty to the handful of people who have ever shown him interest, in spite of his low IQ and naïveté.  The character of Forrest Gump is essentially a blank slate that viewers project their own feelings and nostalgia upon.  To me, it is a glorious picaresque that succeeds thanks to the charismatic humanism of Tom Hanks and the over-arching relatability of Zemeckis’ cinematic techniques.  Forrest is not without agency but he is without cynicism.  It is his guileless loyalty and lack of cynicism that has made the film seem sentimentalized when it fairly earns its emotional climaxes; likewise, Gump’s accidental wealth and fame countered by Jenny’s failed endeavors have made liberal critics spurn the movie for not being an ode to the 60’s counterculture.  It seems people are still projecting their own objectives upon the life of Forrest Gump and the fact that the film lets you do so is testament to its endearing greatness.