👍👍👍👍out of 4👍
The novel, Mudbound by Hillary Jordon, was recently adapted into a Netflix film, directed by visionary, Dee Reese. The film stars a number of heavy hitters that work together to breathe life into this story. Set in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow and World War II, Mudbound follows the story of two families living and working on a farm. One family is white and the other a black family of sharecroppers. Ronsel, the oldest son of the sharecroppers is a decorated army Sergeant in WWII who comes home after serving his country and being treated like a full, valued citizen in the European country he was based in, finding that nothing has changed. Because he is black he is subjected to racism and the threat of violence at every turn if he does not submit to his "place". The white family is struggling economically as are most farmers especially after slavery is abolished, although it is replaced with a new form a slavery, sharecropper. It's honest and almost throughout you are uncomfortable and angry and that is the beauty of this story. Both families are living awful lives, the black family more so than the white family because of legal segregation and the hate and violence that rule their lives.
This movie is dark and there are no winners although some loose much more than others. Someone like James Baldwin might say when discussing what happens to the humanity of racists,
"But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse. This is being done, after all, not a hundred years ago, but in 1965, in a country which is blessed with what we call prosperity, a word we won’t examine too closely; with a certain kind of social coherence, which calls itself a civilized nation, and which espouses the notion of the freedom of the world. "
I highly recommend you check this movie out, but not if you are already having a bad day. I made that mistake this weekend and it has been hard to recover from the realities of the work we have ahead of us.
If you would like to read more, check out NYTIMES film critic, A.O. Scott's review here.
I hope you check it out.
Thanks for reading! Got any recommendations to share?? Share below!
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