Written at the time of the film's release....although I've added a couple of current addendums because this writer-director is so good and his work sought out.Possession is 9/10 of the Law
or
Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places
The last film that Jeff Nichols wrote and directed was the very interesting, very odd, and quite layered Take Shelter.* His latest, Mud, is part coming-of-age movie, part Southern Gothic, part classic romance and part tragedy and complete curiosity. It features a couple of great kid performances and a top-tier cast supporting them.
Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland play two tweeners living on the Mississippi River. They're a couple of restless kids who are hired help in their families, but with minimal supervision, have the freedom to sneak out at night exploring. On one of those pre-dawn excursions they motor over to an island and find a wonder—a boat nestled in a tree. Checking it out, they're in for a shock. Someone's living there. That someone is Mud (Matthew McConaughey) who is eking out an existence there. How he got there is a mystery. Why he's there is not. He's killed a man, who was messing with the girl he loves, and that man has a powerful family (led by Joe Don Baker). He's hiding out, waiting for word from Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and when he hears, they'll run off together, where...well, that's a little unspecific. In the meantime, he uses the little go-betweeners to get food, supplies, and word out, that includes to one of Ellis' (Sheridan) neighbors, a solitary man named Tom Blankenship (Sam Shepard), who Mud labels "an assassin." Blankenship calls Mud a liar, making Ellis slightly conflicted; he's willing to do anything for Mud in his quixotic quest, out of a young man's puppy-love instincts, in part a response to the fracturing marriage of his parents (Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson) and his own interactions with "townie" girls, particularly May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant).
It's to Ellis' advantage that he and "Neckbone" (Lofland) are under the radar of everybody's notice, his parents have other concerns and Neckbone's uncle (Michael Shannon) is in his own little world, so the two boys go back and forth between mainland and island with messages and supplies, which becomes increasingly complex when Mud decides he's going to get that boat out of the tree. And when Ellis, in his come-to-the-rescue way, interferes when one of the goons keeping an eye on Juniper gets aggressive with her trying to get information about Mud's whereabouts.
Things begin to spiral out of control to a conclusion that can't come to any good, despite everyone's best and worst intentions, due to the breaking of borders between the insular natures of the players.
But, there's something else going on here that creeps like an adder through the Louisiana swamp, something to do with misogyny. Maybe it's just the timing of events—not accidental as it's all in the control of the writer-director—but all the problems seem to generate from the war between men and women. The women here—Juniper, Ellis' mom, May Pearl—have an edge of capriciousness and undependability (in the males' eyes, anyway) that derails their plans and dreams. The men are hardly blameless, going through their lives with their eyes wide shut, totally aware that the women in their lives may prove disastrous in the short term, while they're quixotically playing the hero or the rescuer, anyway. Everybody has some romantic view of life that is not theirs, and their pursuit of it proves their undoing. One leaves the theater with the sense of a good story well told, but with a stake through the heart in the futility of good intentions. One wants the waters of life to be smooth and transparent, but the reality of it is that it's the consistency of the movie's title. It's a beautiful film, too. Beautifully shot by Adam Stone. 2021 note: Nichols hasn't made a film since this one and that's a real shame. He's been working on one film, but has been hired by John Krasinski to make A Quiet Place, Part III. Well, whatever gets him back behind the camera. His work is too good not to be making something. Whatever it is, it is of worth.
* I should mention here in 2021 that he's also made a couple other film's I've loved—2016's Midnight Special and the same year, Loving.
The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1979) Something of a miracle. Not just getting into Space. Making a movie of Tom Wolfe's distillation of the effort from the days of breaking the sound barrier post-WWII to the age of astronauts. Wolfe stripped away the Iron Curtain of PR flakkery to tell the story of the men who put their hides on the line to go farther, faster and higher than the earth-bound. And do so on "live" TV. Or in secret during a race for Space with the Russians. Wolfe opened the guarded doors of the test-pilot fraternity and told tales and punctured myths, while simultaneously creating myths anew—of the laconic "other" quality of pilots that pulled them out of scrapes, channeled their fear and kept them climbing the pyramid: the indefinable, ephemeral "right" stuff.
The book was optioned for the movies, but was considered too unwieldy and too expensive to turn into a film. But Philip Kaufman, one of the up-and-coming USC film-school grads took a bare-bones, low-tech approach to the effects, combined it with stock footage of the well-documented space program, and combined it with an irreverent sophomoric humor that combined Wolfe's myth-busting with SNL spoofery.
But just as Wolfe found a new glory glowing inside the heart of the flummery he was burning away, Kaufman found interesting cinematic ways to illustrate those truths and celebrate the gung-ho heroism of a team of competing fly-boys. Chuck Yeager is a horse-riding cowboy of Western tradition riding in to town to take on a challenge. John Glenn's description of "fire-flies" while in orbit, is tied to the bonfires of Australian natives praying for his safe return. And in this stunning sequence, two disparate incidents from Wolfe's book unite the newly-be-knighted Astronauts with their spiritual mentor and comrade-in-wings.
It starts with the arrival of a new test-jet—The Lockheed NF-104 Starfighter, which Yeager believes can break a record for altitude. With his wing-man, Ridley, he does an inspection of the jet working his way back to the exhaust port, which Kaufman pulls in on.
Kaufman takes us into the dark-hole of the jet-engine, and inside we hear echoing voices and whistles and the sound of drums, and before we can register the change, we're not in the negative space of the engine anymore, we've transitioned to another channeled tube of energy—we're traveling through a tunnel riding atop a limousine from an astronaut's perspective...
...as President Lyndon Johnson stands on a flag-draped stage and welcomes the seven Mercury astronauts to an out-sized barbecue in Houston--the new home for the Manned Space Center, as well as the astronauts and their families. Their homes, their furnishings are all paid for by the Houston developers who are benefiting from Johnson's earmarks. The Mercury 7 are living the good life, while the Man who Broke the Sound Barrier makes a run for space.
Both these incidents happened and are mentioned in Wolfe's book, but they took place months apart, while Kaufman has them happening simultaneously. To what purpose will become clear later, but in the meantime, we follow Yeager (Sam Shepard) as he vaults into the sky, his pilot's gear now more closely resembling the astronaut's flight-suits.
And in one spectacular shot, we see space bend and warp as we approach the feathery layer of a cloud-ceiling, then go through it...
...and the picture fades to an incident from that barbecue--an odd detail that Wolfe found funny and sad and a bit pathetic, but Kaufman turns into visual poetry. For some reason, the Houston event organizers chose as one of the entertainers stripper Sally Rand, now in her 60's, doing her famous "fan-dance" that had wowed 'em at the 1933 Chicago's World Fair. But that was thirty years previous. And the elderly Rand tottered around the stage. To what end, no one can say.
But Kaufman takes that incident and marries it with a running theme throughout the film. The Moon has been a beckoning image throughout The Right Stuff, and now, as the clouds that Yeagher is punching through become the delicate feathers of Sally Rand's fans, she dances to an orchestral version of the melancholy "Clair deLune," by Debussey.
And it's lovely.*
Kaufman stays on his images of empty space and feathers and lights, then to shots of the astronauts and their wives reacting to the irrelevance and embarrassment of it all. And then, something strange happens....
John Glenn (Ed Harris) looks over at fellow astronaut Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), with whom he's had a contentious relationship...
...and Shepard's not even watching the stage-show. He's lost in thought...
...as is Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin).
Glenn turns to look at Gus Grissom (Fred Ward)...
...who is already looking at him.
Grissom turns and looks at his buddy, Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid)
...who is his usual grinning self, but he's subdued. We transition back to Sally Rand...
... and a blaze of kleig-lights to Yeager trying to "punch a hole in the sky."
Yeager reaches top altitude, then his engines give out and he's given one tantalizing glimpse of the stars in space...
...before his fighter-jet begins to rapidly tumble back to Earth.
Unable to bring it under control, Yeager makes a fiery ejection...
...and Kaufman holds on him--trailing smoke, because as we'll see his helmet is on fire--and we watch his long, long fall through space as he tumbles through the silence--a modern Icarus...
...who disappears into the clouds.
The clouds fade back to the feathers of Sally Rand.
...and to the astronauts, who are somewhere else.
Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank) begins to look pensive.
Walter Schirra (Lance Henriksen) acts like he hears something...
Glenn, on edge, looks to Grissom and Cooper...
Grissom is wary...
Cooper, head bowed, tentatively looks up...
as does Slayton...
And Shepard cranes his gaze to the ceiling...
We transition to Sally Rand, and on the soundtrack we hear a distant boom.
With a hard cut, we're back in the California desert.
Reverse angle to an ambulance approaching in the shimmering desert heat.
The driver points ahead "Sir? Is that a man?"
Amid the smoke and heat-waves, a silvery shape emerges.
"Yeah," says Ridley (Levon Helm), "you bet it is."
As the music swells, Yeager carrying his parachute, his face burned, but still chewing gum, approaches the ambulance.
Yeah. You bet it is. It's great film-making, too. And a brilliant sequence by Kaufman that shuffles real time a little, but makes a point about the competitiveness of air-men, giving way to a brotherhood. All of the men in the sequence have competed with each other as well as Yeager to be "at the top of the ol' pyramid," going faster and higher than any person before. The astronauts were test-pilots competing with Yeager, then signed on to become astronauts, "spam in a can" in the test-pilots' jargon, achieving a fame Yeager never would...until Wolfe's book...and this movie
Now at this Houston fete, the astronauts "tune in" to Yeager's struggle, as if linked. Backed by an echoing ochestral version of "Claire DeLune," it is haunting and haunted, communicating viscerally, if not literally, of the bond between the men—Indefinable.
"The Right Stuff."
* It is. And that is true because of Kaufman's direction and Deschanel's cinematography, but also—very importantly—to Peggy Davis, at the time, of the San Francisco Opera Ballet, who performed the dance, but more importantly, CHOREOGRAPHED it. She's in the credits, but I didn't know of her until folks who'd been there on-set, and Ms. Davis' niece, wrote in to share their memories. Thank you all.
