Can we talk about Matthew McConaughey? Let’s talk about Matthew McConaughey. After a string of middling romantic comedies, McConaughey went away for a while, and man, has he been excellent since. Most of the roles he’s taken since his return aren’t particularly family-friendly, but parents on date night can certainly appreciate what he’s done in “Magic Mike” and “The Lincoln Lawyer.” “Mud,” though, is a different thing, more appropriate for teenage boys wondering about when and how they’ll eventually consider themselves to be men.
That sense of imminent adulthood defines the film, which contrasts McConaughey, who plays Mud, a man on the run after a terrible act of violence in the name of love, with 14-year-old Ellis (Tye Sheridan, of “The Tree of Life”), a boy struggling to understand why his parents are separating and what to make of his young life. Ellis finds someone to believe in in Mud, someone to champion and support, but just because you want someone to be a good person doesn’t mean they are. Not at all.
The film begins with Ellis and his best friend, Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), both 14 years old, both raised with fairly absent parental figures, both with barely any supervision at all. Living in Arkansas, the two delight in exploring the Mississippi River, all the secret islands and secluded spots, and hear of a boat left in a tree because of a recent flood. They find the place, eager to claim it as their own, until they learn that a man, Mud, is living in it. He’s dirty, he’s emaciated, he’s carrying a gun, he has a perfect drawl—and he wants their help.
Mud is down on his luck, you see, but it’s not his fault … well, not really. He killed someone, sure, but it was because he was protecting the love of his life, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon, of “This Means War,” “Water for Elephants,” and “Monsters vs. Aliens”), who was being abused by this man. So his actions were just, and he’s being unnecessarily punished for standing up for true love. Can’t Ellis and Neckbone just help him out? Provide him with food? Help him fix the boat? Deliver messages to Juniper for him? The requests grow and grow, until they seem more like demands—until the partnership he’s proposing between himself and the boys seems more dictatorial than collaborative.
For the boys, then, Mud’s presence is a catalyst of sorts. For Ellis, the relationship with Mud makes him start thinking about the things he’s passionate about in life, the things he would be ready to commit violence to protect—his parents’ crumbling marriage and his first serious crush, May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant). Neckbone, though, is more ambivalent, more worried about the police looking for Mud; his contentious relationship with his uncle, Galen (Michael Shannon, of “Premium Rush,” “Machine Gun Preacher,” “Jonah Hex,” and “The Runaways”), isn’t helping things. And so the boys begin to grow apart, into separate—and perhaps very different—men.
These are all lofty, ambitious things to consider in a film that eventually includes bounty hunters and a climactic showdown, but Nichols handles things gracefully; although things should get hokey or campy, they don’t. A lot of that is thanks to the film’s deliberate pacing and the grounded, realistic performances from McConaughey and Sheridan, who bring a grounded menace and a yearning authenticity to their roles, respectively. The film is hampered, though, but its overly long runtime; things certainly could have been cleaved by 20 or so minutes. Shannon is fantastic as the useless and aggressive uncle to the goofy-but-love-needing Neckbone, but he’s really only in this movie because of his friendship with Nichols; his role could have been cut entirely.
Perhaps cutting that subplot would have allowed more attention to be paid to the idea of intimate Southern-style living versus commercialized, mainstream America, which comes calling in the form of malls and big-box stores inkling into the boys’ community. That kind of aggressive suburbanization is certainly presented in the film as another factor affecting Ellis and Neckbone (a little like “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” to be honest), but Nichols doesn’t devote as much time to that theme as he should, instead choosing to focus more on closing the film with a traditional antihero structure. Nichols handles the conclusion well, to be clear, but that doesn’t make the trope any less clichéd.
So sure, a more ingenuous ending and a shorter runtime could have pushed “Mud” toward perfection. As it is, though, it’s another winner for McConaughey, a solid introduction for Sheridan, and a thought-provoking depiction of the way our boys become men. It’s worth a look.
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