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Now consider "Loving." Here's a film that was released last March in New York, received a reasonably warm critical reception and then disappeared all summer into some kind of distributorial limbo, turning up finally this week in neighborhood theaters. Somehow it deserved more attention than that. It's not an earth-shaking film, but it is an amusing and intelligent comedy of manners, and George Segal is fun to watch.

Segal plays a commercial artist who's on his way up some days, on his way down other days, and usually wrapped in a state of confusion. In many ways he resembles Ginger Coffey, whose luck was considered in a 1964 film by the same director, Irvin Kershner . Ginger was bedeviled by his own lack of organization, as much as anything. Not his organization of material things, but his organization of his emotional life.

The Segal character has a loving wife and kids at home, a loving mistress in the city, a manager who wants him to make lots of money, and a harassed conscience. His basic problem is that he wants to do the right thing by everybody, and can't. How can you do the right thing by your mistress when, just by having a mistress, you're doing the wrong thing by your wife? And vice versa, these days.

So Segal sinks into the confusions of suburban morality, substituting the martini lunch for the confessional. He can afford ethical soul-searching better than his wife, Eva Marie Saint , who gets to wrestle with the kids while he's wrestling with his conscience. That's part of the problem, too, even if Segal gets everything straightened out morally, his marriage may expire from exhaustion.

Or, as a bartender I once knew once said about a couple he once knew, the screwing they're getting isn't worth the screwing they're getting. Which is also what the movie is about, and where the title comes from, I guess. "Loving" is an ongoing process, as opposed to "love," which as everybody knows is an eternal and unshakable commodity much valued by poets. But Shelley never changed a diaper, and Keats never commuted from Westchester, and loving in the world of 1970 America is perhaps a process of survival, not affirmation.

Anyway, in a genial and long-suffering way, Segal doggedly tries to mend his life, and it helps that his wife really does love him, after her fashion. The trouble is, long weeks of accomplishment can be undone with a single drunken evening, and Segal nearly undoes his entire life during a neighborhood party.

He wanders into view of a closed-circuit TV camera while seducing a neighbor's wife, and everybody at the party (including Second City's Martin Harvey Friedberg ) watches in horror on the screen in the den. Nobody, of course, makes a move to turn off the television, and that's what suburban morality is all about these days, I guess: Honesty.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Loving (1970)

Janis Young as Grace

Keenan Wynn as Edward

George Segal as Brooks Wilson

Eva Marie Saint as Selma Wilson

Sterling Hayden as Lepridon

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Loving and the Ordinary Love That Made History

Jeff Nichols’s film takes a beautifully restrained look at the couple behind the Supreme Court case that struck down bans on interracial marriage.

The pivotal moment of the new historical drama Loving isn’t the Supreme Court decision that struck down state laws against interracial marriage in 1967. Rather, the big scene comes earlier in the film, when Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga), a black woman driven from her home state for marrying a white man, decides to fight for their right to return. Her grand gesture is simply calling an ACLU lawyer and telling him she’s on board for a legal battle.

Despite its profound subject matter, Loving steers clear of unfairly romanticizing its central, history-changing couple: Mildred and her husband, Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton). So it wisely opts instead to portray their union as powerfully ordinary, their love for each other as a settled fact. Mildred’s act of bravery is her quiet decision to have her ordinariness weaponized in the Supreme Court case, Loving v Virginia , to strike a blow against institutional racism.

But Loving lives in the tiny moments that precede the court’s decision and leans heavily on its actors’ subtle performances: A shudder of fear passes across Mildred’s face when she picks up the phone to call the attorney, and there’s a flicker of triumph once she hangs up. Loving is restrained to a fault, but entirely because it doesn’t want the Lovings’ triumph to feel like anything but a certainty. These were regular folks called upon to be symbols for equality because their union was as mundane as anyone else’s; the power of Loving is precisely in that mundanity.

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The film is the latest in a series of interesting choices from the director Jeff Nichols. Through his career, he’s veered wildly between genres, from the sci-fi road trip Midnight Special to the backwoods coming-of-age drama Mud to the religious-fanaticism thriller Take Shelter. In all these films, however, Nichols takes care never to zoom out too far from his characters and carefully builds to every emotional twist and turn. Loving is no different. It’s a film about a sweeping court case that echoed through American history and undid a crucial strand in the South’s Jim Crow laws, but Nichols’s focus remains trained at all times on the two people at the heart of it.

As Richard Loving, Edgerton has the affect of someone who would prefer never to talk about his feelings. His bond with his wife is unwavering, but Richard isn’t one to acknowledge how unusual their marriage is. Even though he drives Mildred to Washington D.C. for the ceremony, in an effort to circumvent Virginia’s laws, Richard says it’s just to avoid “red tape.” When cops burst into their home and demand to know why Richard is in bed with Mildred, he points wordlessly at their marriage certificate, framed and mounted on the wall. After pleading guilty to miscegenation, the Lovings are ordered to leave Virginia for 25 years. They relocate to nearby Washington, but the film emphasizes the trauma of losing their home and immediate communication with their families.

Though Washington isn’t an unwelcome environment for the Lovings and their children, it’s still not home . Nichols’s camera drinks in the wide open farmland of Virginia every chance it gets, while the scenes in D.C. are almost always confined to the Lovings’ home, often to their kitchen, where Mildred makes the bold move of calling the ACLU lawyer Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) and having him pursue their case. Loving is a biopic covering an important moment in American civil rights history, and thus feels like a Oscar contender. But because Nichols avoids stirring speechmaking or teary confrontations, Mildred and Richard feel all the more real, rather than like characters in a sepia-toned history lesson.

Kroll, a stand-up comedian and sketch comedy actor best known for his work on FX sitcom The League and his self-titled Comedy Central show, seems an odd choice at first to play Cohen, and his work in the role is certainly on the broader side. But he gives Loving some energy when it desperately needs it, sowing some necessary tension when he encourages the couple to move back to Virginia in violation of the law so that the case can begin again. He’s the spur Richard and Mildred need to expose themselves to the world, even if it’s much to the intensely private Richard’s dismay.

Viewers barely see a moment of the legal proceedings and hear only snippets of Cohen’s arguments. As the court case progresses, the movie returns to the home the Lovings eventually find for themselves in the Virginia countryside, mostly isolated from racist judgment, but finally free—surrounded on all sides by open air. The power of the film’s final act, where the Lovings finally have created a safe place for themselves and their children , cannot be exaggerated, and so Nichols doesn’t exaggerate. By that point, the director’s subtlety, and Edgerton and Negga’s commitment to their characters’ emotional truth, has already conveyed the true heart of Loving .

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‘Loving’ Review: Historical Drama on Interracial Marriage Is Oscarworthy

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Construction worker and mechanic Richard Loving marries his pregnant girlfriend, Mildred. But instead of happily ever after, the couple are arrested in their bedroom; they’re told to get out of state pronto or face jail time. See, he’s white and she’s black. This is the state of Virginia in 1958 and interracial marriage isn’t just frowned on. It’s a crime.

So begins Loving, in which Joel Edgerton as Richard and Ruth Negga as Mildred give performances that will be talked about for years. It’s the fifth feature from writer-director Jeff Nichols, following Midnight Special, Mud, Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories. I mention those titles because if you haven’t seen them, you should – or you’re missing out on one of the most vitally fresh careers in American cinema. The Arkansas-born Nichols, 37, knows how to tell a true story of injustice without underling emotions to trumpet a blaring self-importance. The film sneaks up on you, quiet-like, until its implications accumulate. And then it crushes you.

Nearly a decade later, the Supreme Court would use the Loving case to strike down the so-called Racial Integrity Act of 1924. But Nichols is less interested in the headline-making case than in two people so entrenched in systemic racism that they almost take it for granted. He traces the daily lives of this reserved couple, who moved to Washington, D.C., missing their own families, friends and the place they called home. The Lovings, both now dead, were not given to speech-making or wearing their emotions on their sleeve. But the pain of their exile is made palpable on screen.

Edgerton, the Aussie firebrand of Animal Kingdom and Warrior, finds bruised feelings in Richard’s every gesture and agonized squint. It’s Mildred, raising three children, who awakes to the changes coming in with the civil-rights movement. She writes a letter to then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, which results in ACLU lawyer Bernard S. Cohen (Nick Kroll) taking the case. And Negga, an actress of Ethiopian and Irish descent, is all kinds of brilliant in a breakthrough performance that should have Oscar calling. When her expressive eyes, usually downcast, rise up to confront a world that needs changing, it’s impossible not to be moved. The stabbing simplicity of Negga’s acting is breathtaking. The same goes for Loving. Nichols has given us a quietly devastating film that resonates for the here and now and marches to the cadences of history and the heart.

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Loving review – a marriage that changed history

I n a film as subtle and low-key as Jeff Nichols’s Loving , it’s not surprising that the first thing you notice are the performances. Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton play Mildred and Richard Loving, the real-life interracial couple whose marriage in 1958 placed them in the crosshairs of the vindictive Virginia anti-miscegenation laws. Negga is up for an Oscar and both received Golden Globe nominations. And rightly so – it’s wonderful, delicate work, which fills out not just each character but the space between them. Their bond is palpable. It’s in the way her eyes flit back to catch his one last time before she leaves a room; the way his slab of a hand, battered from building work and tinkering with cars, encloses hers as they drive, silently but companionably. The uncomplicated easy naturalness of their relationship stands in stark contrast to the impossible situation in which the couple find themselves.

When the authorities are tipped off about the marriage (we never learn by whom), both Richard and Mildred are wrenched from their bed and imprisoned. Richard is bailed out the following morning, but the heavily pregnant Mildred must wait until the judge deigns to see her several days hence. They are given a suspended sentence, conditional on their leaving the state for 25 years. They comply, but a life in inner-city Washington DC is not what Mildred had in mind for her three children. Her letter to Bobby Kennedy asking for help catapults the couple into the public eye as their marriage, so private and cherished, becomes public property as part of a landmark supreme court case.

With so much focus on the performances, it’s easy to ignore the unshowy but eloquent work of director Nichols, who based this film on Nancy Buirski’s HBO documentary The Loving Story . The recurring motif of bricklaying suggests a future together half-built because they have been denied their foundation; a sequence that builds to a minor accident is uncomfortably potent. Nichols’s understated approach to the story, devoid of dramatic grandstanding, chimes with the dignity of the Lovings who “won’t bother anyone” if only they can be left alone to live their lives.

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Review: ‘Loving’ tells the moving tale of a husband and wife who made history because their love was a crime

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“Loving” is an unpretentious film about unassuming real people, but don’t let that mislead you.

Just as Richard and Mildred Loving ended up overturning the status quo and making American legal history, so this feature on their lives by writer-director Jeff Nichols turns out to be a film of quiet but quite significant strengths.

Nichols, responsible for “Mud,” “Take Shelter” and the underappreciated humanistic science fiction epic “Midnight Special,” has gone in a different, more historical direction here. He’s made an involving socially conscious drama about the interracial couple whose marriage, illegal in their home state of Virginia, led to the unanimous 1967 Supreme Court ruling that racist anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.

But “Loving” is hardly a legal drama rife with attorney strategies and courtroom scenes. It’s concerned not with public lives but private ones, with how it happened that two ordinary people, distraught over being trapped for years in the coils of a pitiless system, came to feel enough was enough.

Nichols was born and raised in Arkansas, and his Southern background intensifies his familiarity with the material. He’s also helped greatly by his two stars, a luminous Ruth Negga, memorable in John Ridley’s “Jimi: All Is by My Side,” who is transcendent as Mildred, and Australian actor Joel Edgerton, whose involvement in the role of Richard grows as the film progresses.

“Loving” is based in part on Nancy Buirski’s moving 2011 documentary, “The Loving Story,” which includes potent excerpts from footage shot of the couple by ABC News in 1965 and 1967 as well as expressive black and white photographs taken for Life Magazine by Grey Villet.

Villet is played in the film by Michael Shannon, who has been in all of Nichols’ features. Similarly, the core of the director’s team, including but not limited to cinematographer Adam Stone, production designer Chad Keith, costume designer Erin Benach, composer David Wingo and editor Julie Monroe, have reunited here, giving the result an enviable ease and cohesion.

Using that earlier documentary as a template, and with physical and emotional authenticity in both acting and look as his goal, Nichols and his team have made “Loving” as accurate as they could without making it feel like a copy of reality or compromising its considerable emotional impact.

That impact starts with the opening scene on a back porch in deeply rural Virginia in 1958, when Mildred tells Richard she’s pregnant and he smiles and says “good.” Neither of these individuals is a big talker, but both actors are expert at conveying feeling with body language and facial expression, and at no point in the film do we doubt that these people love each other very much.

The Lovings’ tiny hamlet of Central Point is something of an anomaly in the Virginia of the time, an area where population patterns have developed in a way that racial equality is taken for granted.

Though his burr haircut and blank stare make bricklayer Richard look like an archetypal redneck, scenes of hanging out with Mildred’s family and being the mechanic on a drag racing team demonstrate that he is genuinely color blind, someone who fits in with all races because it never occurs to him that he wouldn’t.

The state of Virginia, however, does not feel that way about race, and a few weeks after the Lovings return from being married in Washington, D.C., they are rousted at home at 2 a.m. by the police and arrested. When Richard points to his marriage license, framed on the wall, he’s curtly told by the sheriff, “That’s no good here.”

Sheriff Garnett Brooks (intensely played by Marton Csokas) and others in the Virginia legal system are not portrayed as drooling bigots but rather as individuals who genuinely believe that this dreadful system of racial separation is what God mandated.

Richard, baffled and horrified, is imprisoned overnight before he can be bailed out, and his wife spends five terrifying days in prison. (“Loving” was shot in the same jail in Bowling Green, Va., where the real events took place.)

Though the Lovings could have been sentenced to a year in prison for “a crime against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” a deal brokered by their lawyer suspends the sentence if they agree to leave the state and not return for 25 years.

Feeling they have no choice, the Lovings depart for Washington in January 1959 and move in with Mildred’s cousin. Children are born, life takes twists and turns, but raising a family far from her own never sits well with Mildred.

Finally, in 1963, after the March on Washington and a pep talk from her cousin telling her “you need to get you some civil rights,” Mildred writes a letter that results in conversations with two young ACLU lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop.

As played by Nick Kroll and Jon Bass, respectively, these lawyers are hardly saviors. Very young and without much experience, they barely know how to proceed. And the Lovings, for their part, are not interested in being zealots or martyrs for a cause. Eager to live back home and raise their children, they just want the whole thing to go away of its own accord. Which it will not.

Moving without being excessive, “Loving” makes some of its points by indirection, like a shot of the Lovings watching Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Though not a word is said, the implication is clear: We can send a man to the moon, but we can’t let these people live together in peace. It is a conundrum that is still with us, one that “Loving” beautifully illuminates.

MPAA rating: PG-13 for thematic elements.

Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes.

Playing Arclight, Hollywood; Landmark, West Los Angeles.

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• DVD & Streaming

Content Caution

In Theaters

• November 4, 2016
• Ruth Negga as Mildred; Joel Edgerton as Richard; Will Dalton as Virgil; Sharon Blackwood as Lola; Terri Abney as Garnet; Alano Miller as Raymond; Christopher Mann as Theoliver; Marton Csokas as Sheriff Brooks; Nick Kroll as Bernie Cohen; Jon Bass as Phil Hirschkop; Michael Shannon as Grey Villet

Home Release Date

• February 7, 2017
• Jeff Nichols

Distributor

• Focus Features

Movie Review

To have and to hold. For better or worse. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. ‘Til death do us part.

Richard and Mildred Loving never exchanged those marital vows. Their union was sealed in a court, not a church. But they knew what they were getting themselves into.

Even the best of marriages have their troubles. And Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a black woman, knew that their union—cemented in 1958, when the South was still heavily segregated—might bring its own unique brand of troubles.

The Lovings were ready for them all. Or so they thought.

Sure, they knew they couldn’t get married in Virginia. Interracial marriage had been illegal there since 1924. So Richard and Mildred get hitched in Washington D.C., then head back home to Caroline County, Va. to start their lives. Once the knot’s tied, the state wouldn’t try to cut it, right?

Late one night while Mildred and Richard are asleep, the county sheriff and a couple of deputies sneak into the couple’s bedroom and arrest them. Before being dragged away, Richard points to the marriage license hanging on the wall.

“That’s no good here,” the sheriff says.

It’s not long before Mildred and Richard are hauled before the judge. The couple’s lawyer cops a plea for the couple: If they admit to their guilt, they’ll be technically sentenced to their obligatory year in prison, but that sentence will be suspended—if the Lovings agree to not set foot in the state for 25 years.

The Lovings accept the deal. What choice do they have? They move north to D.C., eking out a paltry life as their family grows from two to five. But Mildred desperately misses Virginia. The cold city street they live on has few trees, little grass, no open spaces for her children to run. She watches a civil rights march on TV led by a young Martin Luther King Jr. And even though the march is just 125 miles away in Philadelphia, Mildred says it “might as well be halfway ’round the world.”

“All this talk of civil rights,” a friend says to Mildred. “You need to get yourself some civil rights.”

So Mildred grabs a pen and paper and begins to write to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. If anyone can help her and Richard, she figures, maybe he can.

For better or worse , the vows say. For Richard and Mildred Loving, their marriage has been marked by a whole lotta worse . Now Mildred’s determined to get some better .

Positive Elements

Loving is based on the real legal battle of Richard and Mildred Loving. From the time they were first arrested to their eventual victory in the Supreme Court, it was a fight that lasted nearly 11 years.

Obviously their trials—in both senses of that word—were instrumental in opening the door to long overdue civil rights progress, and as such they’re rightly lauded as heroes. But the movie doesn’t leave the matter there. While many in the movie see the Lovings’ relationship as either an affront to the natural order or a landmark case to overturn legal precedent, the double-entendre title Loving reminds us that this is, more than anything, a love story.

Richard is a hardworking provider who, for the most part, lets his actions speak for him: Gruff and often uncomfortable with the growing publicity surrounding them, Rich doesn’t care much about legal precedent: He simply wants to live in peace with his wife, in Virginia if they can. He’s absolutely devoted to her and will do anything to protect her. He refuses the invitation to attend the Supreme Court hearing. But when Bernie Cohen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and the man who’s advancing the Lovings’ case, asks Richard if he’d like to relay any message to the court, Richard says simply, “Tell the judge I love my wife.”

Mildred gracefully takes the lead in the legal proceedings. She’s the one who writes to Bobby Kennedy. She’s the one who commits to meeting with Bernie Cohen. When the lawyers come around and the media starts circling, she’s the one, more often than not, to speak. But when Richard refuses an invitation to the Supreme Court, Mildred—somewhat reluctantly—stands by her husband: “I wouldn’t go without him,” she tells Cohen.

Spiritual Elements

The only context in which religion appears here is, alas, in opposition to the Lovings’ relationship. We first hear the supposed religious justification against interracial marriage from Sheriff Brooks. “It’s God’s law,” he tells Richard. “They’re different for a reason.”

That “reason” is echoed in the language used in the 1924 law forbidding interracial marriage (which is quoted in the movie): “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Sexual Content

Mildred is pregnant when the movie begins—and well before she and Richard legally seal their union. We see the couple kiss and hold one another affectionately. Her sister makes the only crass allusion to their sexual relationship: “You can stop looking at his string bean,” she says. “You know it’s purty.”

When Mildred is first jailed, the Sheriff marches a leering man past her cell. “I should put you in with her tonight,” the Sheriff tells him, trying to frighten Mildred before her release.

Violent Content

One of the Loving children gets hit by a car. He’s fine—just some cuts and bruises, Mildred tells Richard—but it’s the last straw when it comes to her willingness to keep living in the city. Mildred wants to move the family somewhere where her kids can play safely.

Richard and Mildred are yanked out of bed when they’re first arrested. Richard finds a brick in his car, wrapped in a Life magazine story about him and his wife. As he drives home one night, another car seems to be tailing him: Once he arrives, he asks his son to run to a friend’s house and tell the friend to come over with a gun. He does, and the two watch for trouble (that never comes) from Richard’s front porch.

Richard’s mother is a midwife, and audiences see her helping deliver two babies. Neither birth is graphic, but we do see Richard dump out some bloody water during the procedure.

We learn from a slide at the end of the movie that the real Richard Loving was killed by a drunk driver seven years after the Supreme Court verdict.

Crude or Profane Language

One s-word and a smattering of other profanities, including a couple uses each of “a–,” “b–tard” and “d–n.” The n-word is used three times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Richard and others smoke frequently. We see him drinking with some friends at a bar, downing beer and whiskey. Others drink beer and perhaps moonshine at a party.

Other Negative Elements

Richard and Mildred obviously violate Virginia’s (admittedly bad) law at the time forbidding interracial marriage. And when Mildred’s due with the couple’s first baby, they break the terms of their previous sentence so that Richard’s mother can deliver the child in Virginia.

Richard and friends tinker with vehicles for drag racing competitions (that they also bet on), some of which take place on country roads.

The Lovings never said those exact words. But they stayed true to both the letter and spirit of them throughout their marriage, even when the state itself tried to rip them apart. Had they done what so many couples regularly do today—just live together with no legal ties and no formal commitments—they’d have been fine, the movie suggests. “You never should’ve married that girl,” Richard’s mother tells him. “This is all your fault,” Mildred’s sister shouts at him in the face of cascading legal trouble. Still another friend suggests to Richard that he could make all these troubles go away with a simple two-syllable word: divorce.

Nearly everyone wishes that Richard and Mildred would’ve just left well enough alone. Everyone but Richard and Mildred, that is. But Richard and Mildred wanted to make it official. They wanted to make it legal. They wanted to do the right thing.

Loving , with its intimate scale and sparse content concerns, is an accessible, sometimes beautiful story about one couple’s love. But just as importantly, it’s also about the legal sanctification of that love: The public acknowledgement that this man and that woman are not two but one—united, indivisible, ’til death do them part.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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‘Loving’ review: Interracial couple fights for equality in powerful, moving drama

Movie review of “Loving”: It’s the quiet, tiny moments between the Lovings (Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga) that make this a must-see film. Rating: 3-and-a-half stars out of 4.

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“Loving” begins with quiet — not dead silence, but the faintly humming stillness of a rural front porch on a summer night. Listen to it, because that sound is what motivates the people in Jeff Nichols’ sensitive film, and what characterizes the film itself. In a remarkable true-life story, a couple embarks on a yearslong fight for justice: not because they are thinking of history, not because they want to draw any attention to themselves, but because they simply want to raise their family in their tiny hometown of Central Point, Va., hearing those soft crickets at twilight.

Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga), a white man and an African-American/Native-American woman, were forced to leave Virginia after their 1958 wedding — then illegal under state law forbidding interracial marriage. After years in Washington, D.C., they returned to Central Point, and with help from an ACLU lawyer (Nick Kroll), their case went to the Supreme Court of the United States. Low-key and unassuming, the Lovings — was there ever a couple with so appropriate a name? — declined to attend the hearing. He, a brick­layer, went to work; she stayed home with the children.

It’s a film about heroism and the right to love, told without stirring speeches. Instead, it unfolds movingly in the tiny moments between Richard and Mildred, two people who have, quite simply, found a home in each other. Watch how Edgerton’s Joel, a stoic man of few words, puts an arm around Mildred without seeming to think about it, naturally wanting her near; watch how Negga lets her performance speak through her expressive eyes, always looking for Richard.

Movie Review ★★★½  

‘Loving,’ with Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Marton Csokas, Nick Kroll, Terri Abney, Alano Miller, Jon Bass, Michael Shannon. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols. 123 minutes. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements. Several theaters.

The film droops a bit when the lawyers take over for a late sequence, but just try to shake the image of the couple, at the end, facing reporters as Richard’s head trembles on Mildred’s shoulder. The two of them, at that moment, see nothing but each other: just the Lovings, loving.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Moving drama about interracial couple's historic fight.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Love conquers all, even hatred and prejudice. What

Richard and Mildred seek to change the law not for

Some scenes have a menacing air, especially those

"Bastards" is heard, as is "damn,&q

Period-accurate smoking -- especially by one lead

Parents need to know that Loving is a powerful drama inspired by the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), an interracial couple who got married in Virginia in 1958, even though it was illegal at the time. The Lovings are arrested, manhandled, and kicked out of their home as…

Positive Messages

Love conquers all, even hatred and prejudice. What matters is the people you love and the life you've built with them -- and standing up for that life and that love against all odds. Compassion and perseverance are strong themes.

Positive Role Models

Richard and Mildred seek to change the law not for praise or honor but because they want to be free to love whomever they love, regardless of race or class.

Violence & Scariness

Some scenes have a menacing air, especially those that hint at people's dark, violent feelings toward Richard and Mildred. A sheriff manhandles a couple when they're arrested. Verbal threats.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"Bastards" is heard, as is "damn," "hell," "ass," and the "N" word.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Period-accurate smoking -- especially by one lead character -- and social drinking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Loving is a powerful drama inspired by the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving ( Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga ), an interracial couple who got married in Virginia in 1958, even though it was illegal at the time. The Lovings are arrested, manhandled, and kicked out of their home as a result, and there are scenes with a menacing air due to others' dark, racist feelings toward them. Verbal threats and insults include the "N" word (and "bastard" is said in reference to the Lovings' children). Expect some social drinking and period-accurate smoking. But ultimately the message is one of hope and courage: Love and compassion conquer all, even hatred and prejudice. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (4)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Mildred is to become an unmarried single mother.....

Major oscar snub, what's the story.

In LOVING, it's 1958, and Richard and Mildred Loving ( Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga ) are a newly married interracial couple living in Virginia. They're expecting their first child when they're arrested and thrown into jail because Virginia's miscegenation laws make their union illegal. But their one-year sentence is suspended on the condition they leave Virginia and never return -- at least, not together. Years later, they're living in Washington, D.C., but still longing for their relatives back home and the land on which they grew up and had planned to raise their family. Then the American Civil Liberties Union takes up the Lovings' case on the grounds that they were treated unequally on the basis of race. The fight ends up going all the way to the Supreme Court.

Is It Any Good?

This drama is the disciplined, steadfast, and ultimately moving story of one of the most groundbreaking cases ever to reach the Supreme Court. With confident hands, writer-director Jeff Nichols traces the hardships that Richard and Mildred Loving faced on their way to helping overturn the miscegenation laws that for years that prohibited marriage between races in some states, including Virginia.

The challenge for filmmakers taking on real-life events is how to show each step in the story -- some of which may seem more process-focused than exciting when translated to the screen -- while entertaining audiences. Loving succeeds because it quietly and confidently paints a picture of a couple and their family who just want to be left alone to live and love as they wish. Edgerton and Negga are up to the task, their performances subdued but powerful. Loving is a triumph.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Loving depicts the historic events at its center. How accurate do you think it is? Why might filmmakers choose to alter the facts? What are the challenges of adapting a true story for the screen?

Are Richard and Mildred role models ? Why? How do they demonstrate perseverance ? Why is that an important character strength ?

What does this movie teach us about history and how both laws and public opinion change over time? What other laws targeting specific groups of people have been amended/overturned?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 4, 2016
• On DVD or streaming : February 7, 2017
• Cast : Joel Edgerton , Michael Shannon , Ruth Negga
• Director : Jeff Nichols
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors, Multiracial actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Great Boy Role Models , Great Girl Role Models , History
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Perseverance
• Run time : 123 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : thematic elements
• Award : Common Sense Selection
• Last updated : January 26, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case

Betty & Coretta

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Movie reviews, Oscar predictions, and more!

Loving Movie Review — Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga are quietly powerful

Though unsentimental to a fault, loving is a surprising and beautiful portrait of the reluctant revolutionaries, richard and mildred loving.

Movies based on real events often fall into the trap of just showing plot point after plot point, often at the expense of real character development. Take The Theory of Everything or J. Edgar. However, when it goes right — see The Social Network or Malcolm X —  it could be something truly amazing. In Jeff Nichols’ Loving , the entire movie is made up of the moments between the plot points. This is not a story about the case Loving v. Virginia. This is a story about Richard and Mildred Loving.

Jeff Nichols is a master at knowing where to point his camera. Seemingly random shots like that of a group of men drinking around a table or two women hanging clothes take on a new meaning in this film. The former is a form of scathing judgment, the latter is a form of acceptance. It adeptly portrays the dark period of time in this country. However, that darkness is juxtaposed against the love story of the Lovings.

For such a quiet movie, Loving moves at a lightning pace. We cover nearly two decades of the Lovings lives. Thanks to the incredible craft, particularly the costumes and editing, we feel like we are dropped into those periods. As we watch their children grow up and their case progress, we watch their everyday lives (with one too many bricklaying scenes — literal bricklaying). However, when there are more emotional scenes, Nichols adds the flair that he showed in Midnight Special earlier this year. One of those scenes show a photo shoot the Lovings did with time, which yielded one of the most famous photos of the couple:

My biggest criticism of the film is that it’s unsentimental, often to a fault. Sometimes you just want to yell at the screen and tell them to show some emotion. It was an interesting choice. The Loving story is ripe for big emotional reactions, grandstanding speeches, and difficult to watch scenes. Instead, Nichols finds emotion in the stolen glances and soft reactions.

Get  Loving  on DVD, Blu-Ray, or digital on Amazon!

Karl Delossantos

Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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The Nineteen-Seventies of “The Holdovers” Is Conveniently Sanitized

By Richard Brody

Turning toward the past is value-neutral. I’m apt to use the word “nostalgia” pejoratively, but the wish to turn back the hands of time is no worse than any other; with movies, it’s a matter of being clear about what one misses and why. Alexander Payne’s new film, “The Holdovers,” is a period piece, set in the last weeks of 1970, at an all-boys prep school in Massachusetts. Curiously, though, the film is more than just a depiction of that time—it’s made to resemble a popular Hollywood movie from that period. The format and style of the head credits are explicitly borrowed from that era, down to the look and placement of its R rating logo. Though the movie was shot digitally, it’s given artificial grain and even faux scratches to make it look as if it were both shot and released on film. Above all, “The Holdovers” returns to a way of telling a story that reflects what, to Payne, comes off as a simpler, clearer, perhaps more humane time.

Whether it was ever really so or not is secondary; the prime question is how meaningfully Payne’s movie makes the case. He does so with a blend of intelligence and emotion—a clever selection of familiar elements and an earnest investment in their dramatic power. The movie is a pile of clichés reprocessed with such loving immediacy that it feels as if Payne were discovering them for himself. Situations are blatantly button-pushing but realized with such heartfelt sincerity that he seems not to be manipulating viewers but sharing with them the very feelings that he stokes. The emotional realm itself is a warm bath of wide-ranging empathy, yet it’s delivered with some narrative trickery reminiscent of classic movies—and sharing in some of their falsehoods and deceptions.

At Barton Academy, a boarding school, the Christmas season is an ordeal for a handful of people forced to spend it together (and they’re not even family). Five boys are stuck at the school, unable to go home, whether owing to familial disorder or, in the case of a Korean boy, distance. Annually, one teacher is obliged to stay with such holiday “holdovers,” and Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a fiftysomething teacher of ancient history, is this year’s disconsolate monitor. The school’s youthful headmaster (Andrew Garman)—a former pupil of Paul’s—apparently chose him as punishment for having flunked a senator’s son. Paul is both strict and pedantic, with a haughty and sarcastic manner. He grades stringently and has little patience with his students’ playful energy and no interest in their personalities or their lives. He’s a teacher of his subject, not a teacher of his students, not least because he takes them to be spoiled rich kids. He’s curmudgeonly, but leftist curmudgeonly, seething with resentment at the presumed privileges and arrogant assumptions of wealth and class. Still, he has spent his entire career at Barton, from which he is a graduate; in effect, he exhibits intellectual failure to launch. Universally mocked and disliked, Paul is a year-round bearer of bad cheer and a walking bundle of woe. Some of the woes he bears are secrets that are as carefully guarded by Payne as hole cards in a poker game. But others are conspicuous and figure prominently in the plot: Paul has strabismus (behind his back, his students call him “Walleye”) and also trimethylaminuria, a metabolic condition that gives him a strong fishy body odor.

A helicopter ex machina that belongs to the father of one of the students lands on school grounds and whisks the boys away on a ski trip—all except Angus (Dominic Sessa), an obstreperous student whose mother and stepfather are on honeymoon and can’t be reached to grant permission. Now Angus is stuck with Paul over break, along with two other school employees: the school custodian, Danny (Naheem Garcia), and the cafeteria’s chief cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a Black woman in mourning for her son, Curtis, a recent graduate of the school who, earlier in the year, died in the Vietnam War. Mary and Paul strike up a quick friendship of convenience that has deeper roots in pain and sympathy. When Angus accidentally injures himself, the results are physically minor but dramatically major, giving the plot a centrifugal kick—hospital, bar, party—that tantalizes the trio with elusive festivity. Then, as they find themselves back at school, forlornly celebrating Christmas, Angus lifts the mood with a bright idea: perhaps Paul could take him to Boston? Paul, at first dubious, decides that it can be justified as a field trip (and even school-financed), and Mary comes along for the ride in order to visit a sister in Roxbury. What results, unsurprisingly, is a series of adventures and encounters that force Paul and Angus to face and give voice to the sources of their deep-rooted pain. As each learns the specific secret griefs that have made the other so bitter and hostile, we viewers belatedly learn, along with them, what specific traumas have determined the entire course of the action. In the process, the two forge a deep bond, of major practical consequence, that proves Paul’s virtues as a teacher and sets Angus on a constructive path.

Payne’s movie is back-loaded, holding its crucial information about how Paul and Angus got like this until near the end. In so doing, it takes for granted that its main characters’ flaws are indeed traceable to a single dramatic key that was turned in the past. (Angus’s, unsurprisingly, involves the absence of his father and the presence of his new stepfather.) But this reliance on backstory feels questionable, a narrative convenience. The things Paul and Angus reveal are of course things they already know and doubtless think about from time to time. Do neither of them have friends in whom they can confide? By phone call or letter? (Even the socially isolated Paul is ultimately revealed to have at least one good friend elsewhere.) The calculated silences and cagey revelations result in a movie of truncated characters, with truncated subjectivity, trimmed to fit the Procrustean confines of the script.

The prime truncation involves history itself—the inescapable din of news that keeps the turbulent politics and public life of the time at the forefront of attention. The Vietnam War shows up as a cruel infliction on those drafted to fight in it, and the injustice of it is the class-based inequality of the draft, as its student deferments allow the moneyed to avoid service. (Deferments were phased out in 1971.) But there’s no context, no sense that there were protests nationwide—maybe even at Barton or in its nearest town. There’s no sense that not only the war—but opposition to it—was controversial and that taking a stand against it, though well within the intellectual mainstream, remained outside the purview of much of national media. There’s no inkling of the Kent State killings and other attacks on antiwar protesters, no mention of the My Lai massacre. There’s no hint in the movie of any political conflicts involving race, no suggestion of controversy regarding abortion, the rights of gay people, nothing about “women’s lib.” Yet it was impossible to be alive at the time, even as a teen-ager, and not be aware of these things. (The omission is exemplary of Payne’s humanistic mission: he sets Angus up to be, as Paul says, “smart” but not “brilliant,” and the lessons that the young man learns from his new personal bond with his scholarly teacher aren’t intellectual but social, practical, ethical.)

Not only does this hermetically sealed, historically reduced drama falsify the times in which the movie is set, it falsifies the characters and turns them into automata of the plot’s mechanism. The effect is also felt in the performances, or, rather, in Payne’s direction of them, as he guides Giamatti to stay at the level of familiar (albeit appealing) shtick and the prodigiously talented Sessa to overemphasize every one of the few traits that the script allows his role—he gets to flaunt his skill, not his personality. In avoiding the conflicts of the era, Payne also deflects conflicts of today: his blandly apolitical view of the early seventies seems almost designed not to trouble consciences or spark debates. That’s the real core of the movie’s nostalgia: it’s a cinematic nostalgia for an earlier generation’s coddled mainstream, one fabricated by Hollywood’s calculated suppression of whatever might risk controversy too wide or serious to be monetized.

Payne’s omissions and elisions turn out to be more than just a matter of the current events of 1970. There’s another, altogether more personal and more fraught kind of filtering and silencing built into “The Holdovers,” one that echoes with today’s social conflicts. Without spoilers, suffice it to say that the movie’s key revelations pivot on an accusation—after which two people were summoned before the authorities, who took one person’s word over the other’s, seemingly wrongly, solely on the basis of social status and assumed credibility, and the upshot of the resulting scandal proved to be of mighty consequence, determining the entire course of Paul’s life. (For those who aren’t spoiler-averse, the New York Times offers a video clip of the key scene in question). Seeing the movie, with its accusation-centered plot point, I recalled that, in 2020, Rose McGowan accused Payne of committing statutory rape, claiming that Payne had a sexual encounter with her when she was fifteen. (This allegedly occurred in the late nineteen-eighties, when Payne was in his late twenties). Payne denied the allegations . I find a reflection of this situation in the big reveal in “The Holdovers”—and in the way that it’s resolved, namely, with a gentlemen’s agreement to keep the story involving the accusation, whatever its truth, a secret. That’s what comes off as the movie’s key object of nostalgia: the time when personal matters stayed private. ♦

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Loving Vincent

2017, History/Drama, 1h 35m

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Loving Vincent 's dazzling visual achievements make this Van Gogh biopic well worth seeking out -- even if its narrative is far less effectively composed. Read critic reviews

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Loving vincent videos, loving vincent   photos.

Mystery surrounds the death of famed painter Vincent van Gogh in 1890 France.

Rating: PG-13 (Sexual Material|Mature Thematic Elements|Smoking|Some Violence)

Genre: History, Drama, Biography, Animation

Original Language: English (United Kingdom)

Director: DK Welchman , Hugh Welchman

Writer: DK Welchman , Hugh Welchman

Release Date (Theaters): Sep 22, 2017  limited

Release Date (Streaming): Jan 16, 2018

Box Office (Gross USA): $6.5M

Runtime: 1h 35m

Distributor: Good Deed Entertainment

Production Co: Break Thru Films, Silver Reel, Trademark Films

Cast & Crew

Douglas Booth

Armand Roulin Voice

Robert Gulaczyk

Vincent van Gogh Voice

Eleanor Tomlinson

Adeline Ravoux Voice

Jerome Flynn

Dr. Gachet Voice

Saoirse Ronan

Marguerite Gachet Voice

Chris O'Dowd

Postman Roulin Voice

John Sessions

Pere Tanguy Voice

Aidan Turner

Boatman Voice

Helen McCrory

Louise Chevalier Voice

DK Welchman

Hugh Welchman

Screenwriter

News & Interviews for Loving Vincent

Where to Watch Every 2018 Oscar Nominee

2018 BAFTA Winners Announced

2018 Critics’ Choice Award Winners Announced

Critic Reviews for Loving Vincent

Audience reviews for loving vincent.

I wish they'd put half as much effort into the screenplay as they did the admittedly stunning animation. Hell, even jettisoning the plot might have been the better bet that way we could simply enjoy the imagery.

It will be definitely remembered for how it looks: absolutely gorgeous and unique like a Van Gogh painting in motion, that is for sure; yet the film's unimpressive Citizen-Kane-esque plot doesn't offer as much to match its incredible technical achievement, which is a pity.

Film critics tend to talk down on a film when it seems like the core idea of the film is a gimmick. Three-dimensional movies were the talk of the town about 10-15 years ago and have now become an annoyance to many. Loving Vincent is the newest film to try something new in terms of how it tells its story. Being completely painted by hand, this movie moves along as if it had been animated about 60 years ago. A more recent comparison would be to say it looks like A Scanner Darkly, but I truly feel this film's much more unique than even that. This is a wonderfully engaging premise and even without that aspect, here's why I believe everyone needs to see this film, even just based on the portraits alone. Loving Vincent tells the story of Armand, a young man who has been tasked with the devastating venture of delivering Vincent Van Gogh's final letter. Upon arrival of the town that Van Gogh ultimately met his untimely end, Armand finds himself incredibly interested in the mystery surrounding this death. Becoming more of an investigation film than a simple journey, Loving Vincent takes you on a ride that's full of insight and powerful moments between characters. I didn't think I would've been so moved by this movie, but the performances/voiceover work was truly astounding, sucking me right into this beautiful portrait of a film. It's one thing to commend this film for having truly breathtaking visuals, but that's also the understatement of the year. This movie blows away any animated film from last year in terms of being uniquely made. From the nods to Van Gogh's classic works, to the motion and dissolves between scenes, everything about this film felt seamless. That being said, there's a large obstacle that many viewers will have to get over as soon as the film begins as well, being the fact that it's entirely painted by hand. This wonderful aspect of the movie will definitely be off-putting to some, due to the fact that it's the first film of its kind and may be bizarre to look at. For myself, I found it absolutely fascinating, plain and simple. As someone who prefers other forms of art than paintings, I do admire a great piece of art, regardless of the medium. This movie explores a life that pretty much everyone has heard of at some point in time, and I must admit, I didn't know this story was as complex of a mystery as this movie suggests it is. From motivational speeches about life and the universe to questions brought up in a philosophical way, I was incredibly immersed in each and every one of the scenes throughout this film. There's hardly any downtime because every line of dialogue progresses this story forward at a rapid rate. In the end, Loving Vincent may not be for everyone, especially due to its unique look, but the story itself is something I believe everyone needs to see. There is a scene that closes out the movie that I still have playing over and over in my head. As I mentioned many times, this movie is filled with memorable lines of dialogue that truly makes you think about life itself and the universe surrounding us. This may seem biased and this particular reaction will surely not hit everyone the way it hit me, but I found this to be a remarkable picture. I fear this movie will go fairly unnoticed, which is a shame because literally, every aspect of this film is wondrous to behold. This is one of my favorite films of 2017.

A visual tour de force, this is a projection of Van Gogh's art by the 100 or more artists who painted every scene. It is rich with animations of the real-life actors, who are painted convincingly in the Van Gogh style, using scenes based on his actual and famous paintings, which spring astonishingly to life as the action arises. Alternating with the Van Gogh pictures are biographical flashbacks, which are painted or drawn in black and white photo-realism, again of a very high artistic quality. The story involves an inquiry into the circumstances of Van Gogh's death. In this, it is less satisfying dramatically, with loose ends, not grasping the nettle, and stopping short of an accusation of mortal envy. The Gachet interview scene seems too easy and forgiving. The alternative explanation of the fatal gunshot, a mischief by an errant youth, also lacks reality because the inquisitor never questions the (then) boy. The film apologises for the failure of those around Van Gogh to save him. This show is in no way humorous, yet it is recalls The Life of Brian, where Brian's followers parade by, complimenting him for sacrificing himself, instead of rescuing him. Here, the film dwells on Van Gogh's forgiveness of the unforgivable - "don't blame anyone" he is reported to have said, as he lay dying needlessly of an untreated gunshot wound, while several characters come by to see him. The film produces evidence that he was not suicidal, and that suicide was unlikely in the circumstances, and then it goes soft. The critical point about Van Gogh's art is his reach into the condition of the poor, farm workers, women and the hard struggle of life, and into nature. He related most easily with and lived among working people and peasants: in that sense he was a traitor to his class. To combine these sentiments with his artistic power must have driven his well to do friends to distraction, particularly those who wished they could paint. If as it seems Van Gogh also won the heart of a bourgeois woman, half his age, the resentment he inspired must have run deep. The film dips its toes into this unpalatable water, and then weakens, in favour of vague philosophising - was it just Vincent just being Vincent, and did it really matter whether he committed suicide or was killed. Really? Van Gogh's paintings were both sophisticated and fearless; he had enormous generosity of spirit. This film is loving compliance more than it is loving Vincent, and in the end it leaves him to the wolves.

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‘Opening Night’ Review: A Stylish Movie Becomes a Sludgy Travesty

Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the 1977 John Cassavetes film, with music by Rufus Wainwright, turns a taut character study into a corny melodrama.

By Houman Barekat

The critic Houman Barekat saw “Opening Night” in London.

In a London auditorium, a work of art is being desecrated. “Opening Night,” John Cassavetes’s understatedly stylish 1977 movie about an actress struggling with midlife ennui, has been reimagined as a musical by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, and the result is a travesty.

Its antiheroine, the Broadway superstar Myrtle Gordon (Sheridan Smith), has landed the lead role in a play about a middle-aged woman. But she isn’t feeling it: Though she is about 40, she insists she can’t relate. She stumbles through rehearsals, clashing with the director, Manny (Hadley Fraser), and the playwright, Sarah (Nicola Hughes), then goes rogue during previews, taking liberties with the script.

To compound matters, the actress develops a neurotic fixation on Nancy (Shira Haas), a 17-year-old fan killed in a car crash moments after getting Myrtle’s autograph. Convinced that Nancy is a cipher for her own lost youth, Myrtle intermittently hallucinates the dead girl’s ghost, and even converses with it. Myrtle is unraveling, but the show — somehow — must go on.

It’s a compelling story line, filled with dramatic possibilities, but “Opening Night,” which runs at the Gielgud Theater through July 27, is scuppered by a series of poor choices. Smith is miscast as Myrtle, for a start: Her onstage bearing exudes a homely approachability rather than high-strung poise or inscrutable aloofness.

Benjamin Walker is wooden as Maurice, Myrtle’s stage co-star and ex-partner, who Cassavetes himself played charmingly in the film. The estranged couple’s brittle onstage chemistry is an essential ingredient in the drama; here, they seem like actual strangers. Haas’s spectral Nancy is a disconcertingly cutesy symbol of youthful feminine vitality, a sprite-like figure who scurries around the stage in a short skirt, knee-high socks and platform boots — suggesting not so much a young woman as a pubescent child.

The songs, by Rufus Wainwright, are algorithmically bland. Several address aging, including the unsubtly titled “A Change of Life” (about menopause) and “Makes One Wonder,” a duet in which Myrtle and Sarah realize that, as women of a certain age, they may have more in common than they’d like to admit.

Others are about showbiz: “Magic” is an upbeat cabaret-style number about the wonder of the stage; “Moths to a Flame” is a somber, sentimental paean to the indefatigability of thespians everywhere. There is a brief foray into rock opera during an excruciating scene in which Myrtle, having figured out she must banish Nancy’s specter to get herself back on track, scuffles with the girl-child amid flashing strobe lights and 1980s-style power riffs. It’s so schlocky that it almost feels like a sendup.

Jan Versweyveld’s set is a theater within a theater. The rehearsal space occupies the foreground, and a row of vanity mirrors at the rear of the stage represents the backstage area. As in van Hove’s 2019 adaptation of “All About Eve ” — another story about the emotional travails of an aging actress — camera operators stalk its perimeter, transmitting close-up, real-time footage of the actors onto a big screen above the stage.

The idea is to ramp up the psychodrama by bringing us up close and personal, but there isn’t much intensity to intensify. The multiple angles add little to the experience. (The occasional bird’s-eye view is particularly unnecessary, unless you happen to have an interest in the topography of hairlines.) A screen caption at the start of the show informs us that a documentary film crew is recording the company’s rehearsals — a plot device that is supposed to make this camerawork feel less like a gratuitous gimmick, but so flimsily transparent that it has the opposite effect.

There are one or two good moments, including a tense rehearsal scene in which Myrtle objects to having to endure an onstage slap. She says it’s humiliating, but Manny insists it’s artistically necessary. Smith renders the standoff with a bleak comic pathos: At one point she even slaps herself to forestall the blow. (For van Hove, who is known for pushing his performers to the limit, this material is close to home.) Near the end, as the characters make their final preparations for opening night, the big screen cuts to recorded footage of theatergoers passing through the Gielgud foyer a couple of hours earlier — a clever touch that spurred a ripple of amused murmurs from the audience. But these are slim pickings.

As an artist yearning to take back control of her narrative, Myrtle should resonate at a time when questions of agency — for women and minorities, among others — are on many people’s minds. But van Hove’s corny treatment trivializes her suffering. Cassavetes’s movie had an elliptical quality that drew viewers in through the strength of its narrative artifice and the power of the actors’ performances; here, the story never comes to life, and the themes are labored. Van Hove has transformed a taut, subtly observed character study into a sludgy melodrama.

Opening Night Through July 27 at the Gielgud Theater in London; openingnightmusical.com .