Delayed Reaction: Mud

Premise: Two boys help out a mysterious stranger hiding from the law on a small island outside of town.

 

I've had a hard time working up the energy to see this movie, and I don't know why. I've heard nothing but good things about it. It has a lot of people I really like in the cast. Director Jeff Nichols has been really reliable. I think what gave me pause is that I wasn't sure what the movie was. And that turned out to be a good thing.

 

Mud is part coming-of-age story, part romance, and part crime thriller. It's an odd mix. It's hard to pitch the movie in a way that doesn't focus of the crime thriller aspects. These two boys help the mysterious Mud (Matthew McConaughey) who is living on an island, because the authorities want him for murder. They bring him food and collect material so he can repair a boat to flee on. The father of the man he killed is rich and wants revenge. He's sent henchmen to find and kill Mud. That all sounds exciting. The climax is a gunfight, but it actually took me by surprise. Because, most of the movie is about the two boys, and why they are helping Mud. You see, Mud is waiting on the island to escape with the woman he loves (Reese Witherspoon). One of the boys (Tye Sheridan) associates this with both the dissolution of his parents' marriage and his own attempts to woo the girl he likes. The movie ends up being more about when Sheridan is going to realize that Mud's story is not the love story he's hoping it is. I was so focused on that emotional journey that I'd forgotten about the men coming to kill Mud.

 

This ends up being a really nice mid-Mcconaissance movie, released the same year as Dallas Buyer's Club and The Wolf of Wall Street, the year after Magic Mike and The Paperboy, and the year before True Detective and Interstellar...Wow. That really was some run he had there. Not all classics. A solid assortment though.

 

Side Thought: Is the Beenie Weenie brand real? If so, they sure got highlighted a lot in this. McConaughey tears through an unheated can of that in real time.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend