As several characters in the new film Loving express to Richard's character: "You should've known better than that." Loving adapts the lives, loves and legal entanglements of the real-life Lovings, whose challenge to Virginia's Racial Integrity Act led to the landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down miscegenation laws across the country. The facts of the case are fairly simple. Richard, played here by veteran Australian actor Joel Edgerton, was white. Mildred (newcomer Ruth Negga) was African-American and Native American. At age 18, Mildred became pregnant with Richard's child, and in 1958, they were married by a justice of the peace in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriages were legal.
But the couple continued to live in rural Virginia. One night, Caroline County sheriffs, tipped to their illegal living arrangement, burst into their home in the middle of the night (they were hoping to find them having sex, which would be a separate charge) and threw them in jail. The couple agreed to a plea deal that would suspend their jail sentence so long they left the state and did not return together for 25 years — not even to visit their families.
The film is up-and-coming writer/director Jeff Nichols' second film of 2016, coming on the heels of the Spielberg-esque genre piece Midnight Special. Critical opinion on that one was mixed, but few would begrudge him the chance to return to what 2007's Shotgun Stories, 2011's Take Shelter and 2012's Mud already established he does better than just about anyone else in cinema: capture the look, the feel and the humanity of life in rural America.
In hands of a lesser director, Loving could easily be rendered saccharine, maudlin, an example of what some call "virtue signaling." The racist cops who arrested the Lovings and the judge who sentenced them would be disgusting monsters, rather than the mostly indifferent (but nonetheless inhumane) bureaucrats they show themselves to be here. In the Hollywood version of the story, someone would give a speech about how love knows no color, or how the heart can't be kept in a cage. And it all would climax with the couple awaiting the Supreme Court verdict, at which point violins would swell and tears would be shed and there would be much rejoicing.
Nichols instead offers a much quieter tale about two laconic people, who happened both to fall in love and to stay in love despite tremendous hardship. The story plays out not in words, but in the incredibly expressive faces of Negga and Edgerton: the pain they feel being separated from their families and forced to start a new life in D.C.; the struggles they endure trying to adapt to city life; and finally, the terror they agree to live with as they choose instead to violate the law and hide out in an off-the-grid Virginia cabin, with full knowledge that the state could knock down the door and tear apart their lives at any moment.
A letter from Mildred to Attorney General Robert Kennedy asking for help makes its way to the American Civil Liberties Union, who refer the case to then-inexperienced civil rights lawyer Bernard S. Cohen, played here by the comedian Nick Krohl. Cohen is ecstatic to take on the Lovings pro bono, thinking theirs to be a test case that could rewrite constitutional law. But he's both a little too obvious in his glee and a little too obtuse in his thinking — his initial strategy is to recommend the couple, who are raising three children, get themselves rearrested so that they have a fresh charge to contest. As Richard tells Mildred while leaving Cohen's office, "I guess you get what you pay for."
Through it all, Negga and Edgerton give a master class in subtlety. For sure, the deliberative pacing won't be all to all moviegoers' tastes. Much as the Lovings themselves had to fight for more than 10 years to finally live out their dream of going home again, getting the most out of Loving requires a certain amount of patience. But for those willing to engage, the experience is richly rewarding.
Loving
4 out of 5 stars
Rated PG-13. Directed by Jeff Nichols.
Starring Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Michael Shannon.
Now playing.
This article appears in Nov 17-24, 2016.