In ‘Loving,’ true love is revolutionary
Print Edition
JEFF Nichols’ “Loving,” about Richard and Mildred Loving, is about simple-minded people, simply being in love.
Both born and raised in the hills of Virginia, the Lovings wed in 1958. But five weeks later, while Mildred was pregnant, they were roused from their bed at 2am by a Caroline County sheriff, put in jail and later ordered out of the state for 25 years.
In Nichols’ tender, graceful film, a love story progresses naturally, beautifully, with sudden, surreal interruptions — like the middle-of-the-night arrest — that play like abductions. And that’s essentially what they were. Richard was white and Mildred was black, and that was enough to make their marriage a crime in 1958 Virginia.
The Lovings would, after years raising their family in Washington DC, spark the landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling, Loving v. Virginia, that unanimously struck down all anti-miscegenation laws and declared marriage an inherent right.
But “Loving” has none of the familiar dramatics of a social justice narrative. It’s about civil rights revolutionaries who weren’t in the slightest revolutionary.
Richard (Joel Edgerton) is a taciturn bricklayer with a buzz cut. Mildred (Ruth Negga), too, is meek, with big, soulful eyes that belie a quiet inner strength. They’re poor, little educated and overwhelmingly humble. Edgerton and Negga spend a significant part of the film with downcast eyes, too modest to insist on anything except to be left alone. The movie is spoken largely in their faces and their intimate, telling gestures: arms draped around one another, a head laid on the shoulder of another.
The force of Nichols’ film is a steadily accumulating one. The Lovings, played with exquisite quietude by Negga and Edgerton, are steadfast and pure. Even as their case swells with out-of-town lawyers and the potential to make history, they are little affected by the gravity. They don’t go to hear the Supreme Court hearing; “Tell the judge I love my wife,” is Richard’s complete message to his attorney.
The protagonists are soft-spoken, and the deeper truths all interior and unknowable.
In “Loving,” the full impact isn’t felt until the final words. Remembering her husband years after his later death, Mildred is quoted with fitting simplicity. “I miss him. He took care of me.”
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