loving movie review new york times

‘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’ Movingly Retells The Story Of A Civil Rights Battle

First of all, let’s get this part out of the way: Both Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton are outstanding in Loving — a film based on the true life story of Richard and Mildred Loving (which just screened at the Toronto International Film Festival), an interracial married couple who won a Supreme Court case against the state of Virginia and the laws that made their marriage illegal. Also: Director Jeff Nichols is one of my favorite directors working today and seems to somehow get better every single time. But, the person I want to write about first is Nick Kroll. Nick Kroll!

Kroll plays Bernie Cohen, an inexperienced attorney who represents the Lovings on behalf of the ACLU. This could have easily been a disaster of a role for Kroll. You know these types of roles: In the midst of the heavy-handed drama surrounding an important topic, a wacky comic relief character shows up and then the movie becomes something else. (An example I’m thinking of is Steve Carell’s role in last year’s little-seen Freehold . Just take my word for it.) But here Nick Kroll doesn’t overdo it. Kroll has a look on his face that reads, “Oh, I better not mess this up! This is a big role for me!” which happens to work perfectly for a young lawyer with little experience who’s about to try a case in front of the United States Supreme Court. Loving was already great, but when Kroll shows up, the film somehow becomes better. Negga and Edgerton will get the due accolades, but Kroll deserves a lot of credit for not screwing up a role that would be easy to screw up.

What’s remarkable about the way the Lovings are portrayed is how they seem like observers in their own fight. These aren’t dramatic people fighting for their obvious human dignity. These are two people who just want to be left alone to live their lives. Of course, Virginia won’t leave them alone, threatening both with a prison sentence unless they move out of the state. The two move to Washington, D.C. (where their marriage Virginia didn’t recognize took place). Unhappy in D.C., the two secretly move back to a remote farm. They never asked to be civil rights heroes. Mildred did write a letter to Bobby Kennedy — and that’s how the ACLU was notified of their case — but the court case was presented to the Lovings, not the other way around. The Lovings agree to it basically as a means to an end. If this will allow them to live in peace, in their home state, together, then let’s do it. When offered to attend the Supreme Court hearings in person, both decline. Again, they just want to live their lives.

While watching the film, it’s notable by just how recent this all is. The final Supreme Court verdict was handed down in 1967. This is the same year the Beatles were singing about LSD on their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album (I know, John Lennon always denied this, but whatever), yet a white person couldn’t marry a black person in the state of Virginia, a state that, 41 years later, a black presidential candidate would carry on his way to the White House. (And it shouldn’t be lost on anyone how, 15 years from now, people will look back on anti-gay marriage laws the same way. It’s astounding that was also in our so recent history.)

Loving is Jeff Nichols’ finest film to date and a culmination of everything he’s worked for until this point. This is Jeff Nichols’ personal masterpiece. It joins his intimate aesthetic to an important true life story, building on what he’s done in films like Mud , Take Shelter , and this year’s earlier Midnight Special . That film showed he was a master of strange fiction, but the same skills serve him well in dealing with reality. And Ruth Negga is a lock for a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. And like always, Joel Edgerton will get overlooked because Joel Edgerton always gets overlooked. Seriously, what’s the deal with that? He’s one of the best actors working today.

Oh, and then Nick Kroll shows up!

Mike Ryan lives in New York City and has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York magazine. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.

Watch CBS News

How Richard and Mildred Loving "paved the way" for interracial marriage

November 22, 2016 / 1:01 PM EST / CBS News

The new movie, "Loving," chronicles the lengthy fight for interracial couples to get married in the U.S. Mildred and Richard Loving were the couple behind the landmark Supreme Court case when the state of Virginia challenged their marriage more than 50 years ago.

The Lovings were a quiet, unassuming couple from rural Virginia who got married hoping to live among their friends and family, but quickly ended up in the middle of a decade-long legal battle. In the end, their struggle shows how regular people can change the world, reports CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford.

"We were married on the June -- second day of June, and the police came after us the 14th of July," Mildred said in a January 1965 interview with CBS.

Mildred and Richard Loving were unlikely civil rights pioneers. The new movie tells their story: married in 1958 in Washington, D.C., they were arrested when they returned home to central Virginia.

Authorities ordered them to leave Virginia or face five years in prison for violating the state's ban on interracial marriage, as the couple explained in the CBS interview.

"I didn't want to, you know, leave away from around my family and friends," Mildred said.

"Leaving my home was the hardest for me. Because I didn't see why it made sense to have her leave," Richard said.

The Lovings settled in Washington, and seeing the struggle for civil rights up close gave them hope.

Philip Hirschkop was a recent law school graduate who, along with law partner Bernard Cohen, got involved in the Loving's fight after Mildred wrote a letter to the American Civil Liberties Union. Initially it was seen as a simple criminal case.

"Did you know right away this is a case that could change history?" Crawford asked.

"No," Hirschkop said. "If it was something of such great note, there's no way the ACLU would've let Bernie Cohen and me do it. He was two years out of law school with no experience whatever, and I was two months out of law school."

"Two months?" Crawford said.

"Saying we had no significant Supreme Court experience is overstating it. We had no Supreme Court experience," Hirschkop said, chuckling.

Despite the civil rights milestones of the 1960s, more than a dozen states at the time still banned interracial marriage.

"Those who support such laws claim they are necessary in order to preserve the purity of the races," one CBS News reporter said in 1965 in front of the Supreme Court.

"Ultimately the courts were our saviors," Hirschkop said.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren was ready to end those laws. Its unanimous decision in Loving v. Virginia immediately changed the lives of interracial couples across the country -- including Rolf and Joan Esser.

"Did you ever think, 'I'm getting married. I want to get married where I grew up?'" Crawford asked.

"Exactly. But I knew it was illegal," Joan said.

Born just miles from the Lovings in Doswell, Virginia, Joan moved to New York in the mid-1950s where at a party she met Rolf.

"A black beauty. A princess," Rolf said, describing Joan.

A German immigrant, Rolf was captivated. 

"Did you know that it might be considered illegal to have a relationship?" Crawford asked.

"No, no. I thought there was nothing wrong with it. Of course, you know, it was not a common thing. I know that," Rolf said.

When the Essers decided to get married in 1968, Joan assumed they couldn't return to Virginia.

"So we planned our wedding in New York, and I thought, 'It's going to be so sad. My parents won't be there. My family, my siblings. … And then I got a phone call from my mom telling me that there'd been a Supreme Court ruling. … She said, 'You can now legally get married down here!'" Joan recalled.

All because an unassuming couple was determined to go back home.

"So they were the pioneers for us. They made -- paved the way," Joan said.

And idealistic lawyers believed the country was ready for a new direction.

"There were a lot of outside influences that had nothing to do with our abilities," Hirschkop said.

"But it still changed history," Crawford said.

"It did. And it's -- these press interviews don't do much for me on it, but sometimes when I shave in the morning there's no one else there, I can look in the mirror and say to myself, 'Hey pop, I did right,'" Hirschkop said.

The Supreme Court's groundbreaking decision in Loving vs. Virginia confirmed the right to marry was protected by the Constitution and paved the way for future barriers to be broken. Last summer, the court overturned state laws banning same-sex marriage, a decision that wouldn't have been possible without Mildred and Richard Loving.

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Review: Jeff Nichols spotlights an important romance worth 'Loving'

The cars, clothing and political climate are from another era in the period film Loving, but its themes couldn’t be timelier.

Writer/director Jeff Nichols takes moviegoers back to the 1950s and '60s for Richard and Mildred Loving’s true-life love story, which resulted in the 1967 Supreme Court ruling that nixed laws prohibiting interracial marriage. While  Loving (*** out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles; expands nationwide throughout November) is for the most part a no-frills, almost sedate affair, the drama finds its real power in two strong lead performances.

Set in Caroline County, Va., at a time when whites and blacks were mostly segregated and racism wasn’t subtle, Richard (Joel Edgerton) is a taciturn Caucasian bricklayer very much in love with hot rods and his girlfriend Mildred (Ruth Negga), a young African-American woman. She gets pregnant, he’s excited by the news and they head up to Washington to wed.

Exclusive: These 'Loving' re-creations will move you

But what's legal in D.C. isn't in Virginia, and many in town don’t approve of the relationship — especially the cops, who arrest the Lovings. That begins a long bout of legal trouble, forcing the couple to leave their extended families behind, and Mildred’s letter to Bobby Kennedy gets the American Civil Liberties Union involved.

Negga, a breakout from AMC’s Preacher , is an instant awards contender. As Mildred, she fuels much of the film’s emotion, sitting in jail pregnant, dealing with relatives divided on whether her love is worth being in quasi-exile, and needing to return to farm life for the good of her kids. Negga gives her vulnerability but also strength of heart.

Edgerton is more minimalist, since Richard is a man of few words who would rather avoid the spotlight as their case makes national news. The Australian actor's performance in Black Mass put him on a lot of people's radar last year, but he's fantastic here, using a workmanlike manner to express Richard’s undying love for Mildred, as well as his guilt that their relationship has caused her so much hardship.

Nick Kroll, best known as a comedian, lends slick style and skill as ACLU-appointed lawyer Bernie Cohen, an ambitious guy with a lack of constitutional know-how. And Nichols regular Michael Shannon gets a cameo as Life magazine shooter Grey Villet, whose photographs helped the Lovings go mainstream.

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None of the performances are overly showy, nor is the movie on the whole. When Mildred tells her husband, “We may lose the small battles but win the big war,” it’s not so much a passionate statement as a reserved call to arms. And when Richard says to her, “I can take care of you,” the simplicity is heartfelt.

With same-sex partners still fighting for marriage equality, the Lovings’ struggle remains as relevant to American culture as it was 50 years ago. The real artistry of Loving , though, is in the quiet grace Negga and Edgerton bring to one of recent history’s most important romances.

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Movie Review: 'Loving'

"Loving" is a new historical drama looking at how one couple's marriage changed the laws of this nation. Time Warner Cable News film critic Neil Rosen filed the following review.

Mildred and Richard Loving were married in Washington DC in 1958. But when they returned to their home in Virginia they were arrested, because mixed race marriages were illegal in that state. Sentenced to leave Virginia for 25 years, this is about their nine-year fight for justice and how their case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

As the Loving's, Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga turn in terrific performances. Edgerton in particular, a native Australian, makes a remarkable transformation and is utterly convincing as a soft spoken Southern bricklayer.

But writer/director Jeff Nichols leaves some unanswered questions on the table and that's just one of the film's many shortcomings. It's extremely slow paced, and once you get past the Loving's arrest, which takes place early on, there's very little dramatic tension in the film. The Supreme Court case is not even shown - just the verdict. Considering the explosive nature of the subject matter, another director could have made the material a bit more compelling.

The Loving's relationship is underdeveloped, at times mundane and even remote, so you can't even get a good sense of the love between the Loving's. Most importantly were not shown how the social and political climate changed dramatically in this country from 1958 to 1967, which made that landmark decision by the Supreme Court possible.

Sadly, the historical significance of the event gets somewhat shortchanged in the low-key approach that this filmmaker has taken, making "Loving," for the most part. a missed opportunity.

Neil Rosen’s Big Apple Rating:

‘Loving’ is an Inspiring Story of Love Overcoming Hate

Jeff Nichols prefers to take his time telling stories; perhaps it’s due to his southern sensibilities. Nichols’ latest film, Loving , opens to the sound of crickets chirping. He lets the moment just linger; no music, no dialogue. Finally, he moves on to close-ups of his actor’s big beautiful faces. It’s an appropriate introduction to a film that tells so much of its story with the things left unsaid. If you’re a fan of Nichols’ previous films, then odds are you’re going to fall in love with Loving . Even if you’re unfamiliar with Nichols’ previous work, Loving’s powerful story, intoxicating cinematography, and unbelievable performances will pull you right in .

Loving tells the real-life story of Mildred ( Ruth Negga ) and Richard Loving ( Joel Edgerton ), an interracial couple that fell in love and got married at a time when such romances were forbidden. Young, in love, and with a baby on the way, not even Mildred expects her romance with Richard to have a happy ending. Either too smitten or too naïve to care, Richard throws caution to the wind and proposes to Mildred, the love of his life. In 1958, the Loving’s home state of Virginia deemed interracial marriage illegal, forcing the couple to drive to Washington and perform the ceremony in secret.

As long as they can be together, the Lovings are fine with keeping their marriage under wraps. Their honeymoon period doesn’t last very long. In the middle of the night, the police come crashing through their bedroom door, drag Richard and Mildred out of bed, and haul them off to jail. The Lovings each receive a one-year jail sentence but have their sentences suspended on the condition that they leave the state. Born and raised in the country, Mildred has never even been to the city. Despite her attempts to acclimatize to city life, it’s clear that Mildred’s heart remains back in Virginia with her family. The rest of the film focuses on the Lovings’ battle to return home as husband and wife.

What sets Loving apart from other films is how comfortable it is in its own skin. The movie doesn’t lean on melodramatic courtroom speeches or rousing scores to give anyone the feels . Nichols is so skilled at his craft that he doesn’t rely on the usual cinematic bells and whistles. Instead, he emotionally guts his audience through visual storytelling and by evoking knockout performances from his cast.

Authenticity is essential when creating a period piece. Nothing takes an audience out of the moment faster than obvious Hollywood chicanery. One of the reasons the Magnificent Seven remake doesn’t work is because it feels too polished. The Magnificent Seven’s costumes and sets look like something you see on a Universal Studios tour. By contrast, Loving’s production design looks incredible. Production designer Chad Keith’s painstaking attention to detail infuses the film with an authentic feeling, old-school soulfulness. Loving paints such a vivid picture of the late 50’s that I feel like I can step into the screen and order a drink at the local malt shop – let’s call this desire for wish fulfillment, “the reverse Purple Rose of Cairo .”

Loving is openly advertised as the story of the couple who fought to change Virginia’s marriage laws, so to call anything a spoiler is a stretch, but consider yourself warned. Towards the end of the film, there is a moment when the Lovings’ lawyers are preparing to go to the Supreme Court. In most films, some overwrought courtroom speech would serve as the climax. Instead, before leaving, the lawyers ask Richard what he wants them to say on his behalf. His response is, “Tell them I love my wife.” Those six words gut-punched me harder than anything else I’ve seen in a movie this year. It takes a confident filmmaker to hinge such a huge moment on such a modest line. It’s a brave choice and it’s an example of how Nichols is only growing more self-assured with each passing film.

Ruth Negga: remember the name. Odds are she will own Hollywood one day. It’s been a long time since an actor/actress had me so unapologetically in the bag. This woman is something special, that is if her otherworldly performance even qualifies as human. In the film, she’s more like an emotional tsunami in a sundress. Negga completely melts into her character. She conveys Mildred’s frustration and exhaustion so wholeheartedly that I instantly tuned into her pain. In one scene, after receiving a phone call, she left me an emotional wreck just through the mix of hope and anguish in her eyes. Negga is about to become acting royalty and Loving is the moment she’s anointed to her throne.

Edgerton delivers a powerful performance of his own. As Richard, Edgerton is a lovable knucklehead. He displays an adorable aww-shucks demeanor, often communicating without making eye contact, head down, and hands in his pockets. He’s the kind of guy who moves his lips when he reads long words in the Sunday paper. It’s Richard’s simple disposition that keeps him from overthinking his complicated relationship. He loves Mildred and that’s all that matters. Edgerton’s never been better. Everything from his world-weary gaze to his hunched shoulders constantly reminds the audience of the oppression, fear, and indignity wearing him down every single day.

Loving is the work of a phenom director firing on all cylinders. The story is both heart-breaking and uplifting; the enthralling production design and cinematography actually romanticize such an ugly era, and the performances can’t receive enough praise. What’s most impressive is how Nichols tells such a powerful story with whispers instead of roars. Loving arrives at a time when we can all use encouraging tales about love overcoming hate. After all, what’s more inspiring than a love that blossomed when it had every reason to wilt?

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Film Review: Loving

I could feel the wet Virginia humidity as I watched Loving . As a native Virginian, I slipped easily into the story of these two quiet yet courageous people and their love for each other. Although 50 years have passed since Richard and Mildred Loving brought their case before the United States Supreme Court, I understood these characters. I know them.

Loving is based on the true story of Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a black woman, who fought for the right to love each other.

Because of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, interracial marriages between whites and people of color were criminalized in the state of Virginia. Virginia adhered to the “one-drop rule”, which stated that any person with at least one non-white ancestor was black. Mildred Loving was of African American and Native American ancestry.

The story begins with Mildred and Richard discovering that they are pregnant. They want to marry, so they elope. They drive to Washington, D.C. where the Racial Integrity Act is invalid, are married, and return to Virginia.

One night soon after their return, the local police break into their house and arrest them. The Commonwealth of Virginia refuses to recognize their marriage license.

The Lovings are convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. Their sentence is suspended by the judge on the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia together for at least 25 years.

Banished, the couple move to Washington, D.C., where they raise their family. But their punishment weighs heavily on Mildred. After five years, she writes a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy begging him for his help.

Kennedy refers the Lovings to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU takes their case to the Supreme Court.

The Setting and Characters

The movie was filmed on location in Virginia and shows how far Virginia and the United States have come in our history of civil rights.

It also highlights how dark our history can be.

Australian actor Joel Edgerton ( The Great Gatsby ) plays the taciturn Richard Loving. Edgerton relies on his body language to convey who Richard is. His lines are few – short and clipped, but his face and body reveal so much.

Richard is careworn, his body battered by life. However, in one simple yet moving scene we see the hardship of a cruel life slip away. LIFE Magazine sends photographer Grey Villet to the Lovings, and after spending the evening with them Villet captures a moment of pure joy and intimacy between the couple. As they sit together watching television on their sofa, Richard relaxes, and we the viewers get to see the man he was meant to be.

Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga is Mildred Loving. Mildred is a more open and approachable character than Richard, yet Negga also uses her body language to help us understand what her calm and soft-spoken words are truly saying.

Negga is nominated for Best Actress at this year’s Academy Awards.

Final Thoughts

Loving is a story that you expect to be full of courtroom drama and dramatic, moving speeches. However, it is instead a story about two people who refused to stop loving each other. Who refused to give up on their vows, their family and their dream for a marriage and a home to call their own.

Loving is one of those rare movies that will leave a sense of responsibility with you. I left the theater believing that although such violations against civil rights have been amended, they are still worth defending. Our rights may inspire us to be courageous and strive toward justice, but they are fragile and delicate too. Our rights must be cherished and protected.

To learn more about the Richard and Mildred Loving, click here. *

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Emily Greene wrote her first poem in third grade; since then she has traveled to distant lands in search of story. As a Third Culture Kid, Emily has lived in diverse cities and nations around the world. She serves as the digital content coordinator at Prison Fellowship and resides in Virginia with her husband.

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Loving review: A quiet, powerful film about one of America's most historic cases

Loving is an intimate domestic drama in which the protagonists themselves hardly seem to notice their own historical roles, article bookmarked.

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Jeff Nichols, 123 mins, starring: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Marton Csokas

Most movies set during the Civil Rights-era are confrontational affairs. There will be marches, protests, police violence, rousing speeches, and probably a chorus of “we shall overcome”. Jeff Nichols’ admirable new feature Loving approaches its subject matter from a very different angle. Its perspective is that of an interracial couple Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), who are planning to get married and start a family.

As the film starts, Mildred is already pregnant. There may be social upheaval around them but their concerns are purely practical. They want to stay together. In late 1950s Virginia, where anti-miscegenation rules are in force, that is a considerable challenge in itself.

Loving is a subtle and carefully crafted film in which speechifying is kept to a minimum. Neither Richard nor Mildred say very much at all. Richard, in particular, is taciturn. He works with his hands, as a mechanic and bricklayer, and always seems to have a puzzled frown on his face but his devotion toward Mildred is apparent.

Edgerton is superb in a very unshowy role, convincing us of his love for Mildred and of his desire to protect her at all costs. Negga, who is Oscar-nominated, captures her character’s gentleness, verging on diffidence at times, but also her absolute loyalty to her husband and children. Like Richard, she is resilient. Both are told by close relatives that they’d be safer apart but that’s advice that they ignore.

The white folk in the community don’t like the couple’s outward show of affection at all. Nichols doesn’t need to spell this out with big dramatic set-pieces. All it takes is a few shots of the hostile and suspicious expressions on faces when they see the couple together.

All of Richard’s decisions are pragmatic. He takes Mildred to Washington to marry her there because “there’s less red tape” and he then hammers the marriage licence onto the wall, as if it is an amulet that will protect him from the racist cops and judges. Of course, it doesn’t. There is something Kafka-esque about the couple’s experiences as they hear a knock on the door in the middle of the night and are hauled off to jail for the crime of marrying. “That’s no good here,” the sheriff (Marton Csokas) snarls when Richard points to the wedding licence.

The film is ostensibly about the Loving v Virginia Supreme Court Case of 1967 which overturned laws trying to restrict or forbid interracial marriage. Nichols, though, is far more interested in the intimate, domestic lives of his protagonists than in making a courtroom drama. The courtroom scenes are dealt with in very cursory fashion.

The judge is a pettifogging figure who thinks that a lengthy suspended prison sentence constitutes leniency and that he is being far kinder than he needs to be in allowing the couple to remain free as long as they go far away. The defence lawyer seems to agree. Racist attitudes are so ingrained that nobody in this corner of Virginia will accept the fact of a white man living with a black woman.

Not a huge amount appears to happen here. The couple have more children. They grow older. They are intensely homesick and Mildred doesn’t like the idea of bringing up her kids in a big city. She wants them to be back home, in the countryside. There’s something almost comical in Richard’s reticence and in his suspicion of the media, who become very interested in the couple when lawyers from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) talk about taking their case all the way to the Supreme Court. He won’t comment at all and if he does speak, it will be to say something like “tell the judge I love my wife”.

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There’s a short but effective cameo from Nichols’ regular collaborator Michael Shannon as Grey Villet, a LIFE photographer who turns up at the family home to take pictures of Richard and Mildred. Grey, who wins their trust, spots exactly what makes the couple so special – namely their ordinariness. His photographs, like the film itself, capture them as a very typical all-American husband and wife, at complete ease in one another’s company.

Produced by Colin Firth, the film at times has a British sense of understatement to it. Richard and Mildred don’t ever make heart-wrenching declarations of their love for one another but it is apparent all the same. The irony is that this couple, with no particular interest in politics but with a sense of common decency and an utter determination to stay together, helped change American law. Loving is a quiet film but a powerful and uplifting one – an intimate domestic drama in which the protagonists themselves hardly seem to notice their own historical roles.

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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 .

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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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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Loving (1970)

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Loving Frank

by Nancy Horan

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• Historical Fiction
• Midwest, USA
• Minn. Wis. Iowa
• Early 20th Century
• Strong Women

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An exceptional first novel based on the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her clandestine love affair with famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives. In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright. Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion. Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.

1907 Chapter 1

Mamah Cheney sidled up to the Studebaker and put her hand sideways on the crank. She had started the thing a hundred times before, but she still heard Edwin’s words whenever she grabbed on to the handle. Leave your thumb out. If you don’t, the crank can fly back and take your thumb right off. She churned with a fury now, but no sputter came from beneath the car’s hood. Crunching across old snow to the driver’s side, she checked the throttle and ignition, then returned to the handle and cranked again. Still nothing. A few teasing snowflakes floated under her hat rim and onto her face. She studied the sky, then set out from her house on foot toward the library. It was a bitterly cold end-of-March day, and Chicago Avenue was a river of frozen slush. Mamah navigated her way through steaming horse droppings, the hem of her black coat lifted high. Three blocks west, at Oak Park Avenue, she leaped onto the wooden sidewalk and hurried south as the wet ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Do you think that Mamah is right to leave her husband and children in order to pursue her personal growth and the relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright? Is she being selfish to put her own happiness and fulfillment first?
• Why do you think the author, Nancy Horan, gave her novel the title Loving Frank? Does this title work against the feminist message of the novel? Is there a feminist message?
• Do you think that a woman today who made the choices that Mamah makes would receive a more sympathetic or understanding hearing from the media and the general public?
• If Mamah were alive today, would she be satisfied with the progress women have achieved or would she believe there was still a long way to go?
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Despite having "bodice-ripping" potential, Loving Frank is most firmly a novel grounded in research, not a 'romance'. Of course, the love affair between Mamah and Frank is central to the story, but Loving Frank is first and foremost the story of Mamah's life, and although the relationship between her and Frank is interesting, it is the exploration of her character and the period details that impact her life that keep the reader enthralled, as she struggles to reconcile her need to be with Frank, her need to be with her children and perhaps most powerful of all, her need to discover who she is herself... continued

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• The Lloyd Wright's home, and Frank's studio in Oak Park, Illinois .
• The Robie House , considered by many to be the finest example of Wright's Prairie architecture.
• A photo of Mamah Borthwick ...

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

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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Review: ‘Loving Vincent’ Paints van Gogh in His Own Images

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By A.O. Scott

• Sept. 21, 2017

“Loving Vincent” addresses its subject, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, with two what-ifs — one marvelous and fantastical, the other empirical and pedestrian. What if his paintings, with their wild colors and vibrant brush strokes, had been able to move? And what if the bullet that killed him had been fired by someone else?

A long and arduous labor of love by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, the film turns van Gogh’s work into an unusual kind of biopic. Using tens of thousands of oil paintings commissioned from scores of artists, the filmmakers transform famous works of modern art into a hypnotic and beguiling cartoon. The people van Gogh rendered on canvas — the provincial French functionaries, doctors, barmaids and farmers immortalized on museum walls — are brought to uncanny life, with the voices of professional actors, some of them well known.

They participate in a meandering detective story. Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), the layabout son of a village postmaster (Chris O’Dowd), is instructed by his father to deliver a letter to Vincent’s brother Theo. Armand travels to Paris and then to Auvers-sur-Oise, the northern French town where Vincent died, leaving behind contradictory memories among the people he painted in his final years. They recall a passionate, hard-working artist, but not always the tormented, suicidal genius of legend.

That legend has been sustained by earlier movies, notably Vincente Minnelli’s rumbustious “Lust for Life” (with Kirk Douglas as van Gogh) and Robert Altman’s more cerebral “Vincent & Theo” (starring Tim Roth and Paul Rhys as the brothers).

Vincent himself (Robert Gulaczyk) is a more elusive presence in “Loving Vincent,” since most of its action is posthumous and self-portraits make up a relatively small part of his oeuvre. There are flashbacks, but the painter is evoked mainly through the dialogue of the other characters, as if he were the Maltese Falcon.

The principal mystery is the stuff of police procedural, as Armand doggedly tries to reconstruct van Gogh’s final weeks and shed light on the circumstances of his death. How miserable was he, and why? What secrets did he harbor? What enemies had he made?

The questions are interesting, but not quite sufficiently dramatized to sustain “Loving Vincent” for its full length. As the story limps and drags, the viewer also becomes accustomed to the images, and astonishment at the film’s innovative, painstaking technique begins to fade. But its charm never quite wears off, for reasons summed up in the title.

Loving Vincent Rated PG-13. Lust for life, and violent death. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

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‘loving vincent’: film review | annecy 2017.

Directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman worked for 7 years on the entirely hand-painted film 'Lovingt Vincent,' which played in competition at Annecy.

By Jordan Mintzer

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There have already been quite a few films about Vincent van Gogh, ranging from the heroic ( Lust for Life ) to the dramatic ( Vincent & Theo ) to the enigmatic (Maurice Pialat’s masterly Van Gogh ). All of them offer up their own interpretations of the artist’s brief and tumultuous life, which ended abruptly from suicide at the age of 37, after he had completed roughly 800 paintings in the span of less than 10 years.

While such movies attempted to portray the painter through his actions and words, none have quite been able to reveal the man through his work. Such is the unique feat of Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s entirely hand-painted biopic Loving Vincent , a film that uses van Gogh’s canvases as both form and function, animating them into a saga tracing his last days in Arles, where he made his greatest artist breakthroughs, to his stay in Auvers-sur-Oise , where he died in 1890 after shooting himself in the torso.

Or so goes the story. In this Polish-U.K. co-production, which took nearly seven years to complete, the death of van Gogh (played by Polish theater actor Robert Gulaczyk ) turns into a murder mystery that revisits his suicide from multiple angles, with a young man named Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), who was the subject of several portraits by the artist, serving as both detective and narrator. It’s a plot device that keeps the suspense afloat but can also feel somewhat manufactured, if not downright hammy, at times, turning the allusive van Gogh into the protagonist of a garden-variety crime novel.

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Still, there are enough traces of the artist himself in the movie, from his many paintings to the famous letters he wrote to his brother and benefactor Theo, to please both experts and newbies, who should enjoy watching his work come to life onscreen. Well-received by audiences for its Annecy world premiere, Loving Vincent has already racked up enough foreign pre-sales to guarantee steady exhibition after its fest run.

Employing many of the tools of a standard TV thriller, from flashbacks to reenactments to scenes viewed from van Gogh’s troubled POV, the script (by the directors and Jacek Dehnel ) has Roulin fils traveling from Arles to Auvers at the request of his father, postmaster Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd ), to deliver a last letter to Theo. But when Armand arrives up north, he finds that Theo is dead as well, having succumbed to the effects of syphilis after being crushed by his brother’s demise.

Piqued by a curiosity that doesn’t always seem justified, Armand decides to stay in town to find out what really happened to Vincent. He receives different versions of the story from various subjects of van Gogh paintings, from legendary Impressionist art supplier Pere Tanguy (John Sessions) to Adeline Ravoux (Eleanor Tomlinson), whose family ran the local inn where van Gogh stayed and eventually died, to Marguerite Gachet ( Saoirse Ronan) and her father, Dr. Gachet (Jerome Flynn), who treated the artist during his turbulent final months, all the way up to his deathbed.

Annecy: Guillermo del Toro Talks Creative Freedom With Netflix, the Future of 'Hellboy'

Each character has a diverging opinion of the painter and what may have happened to him, and in that sense Loving Vincent does offer up a fairly complex portrait of a man whose more inexplicable acts — the film kicks off with the infamous ear incident in Arles — will never be fully understood. But there’s also a feeling that the filmmakers have concocted their whodunit narrative simply as a means to an end, with that end being to showcase van Gogh’s oeuvre in a way that has never been done before.

To that extent, the painstaking work done by Kobiela and Welchman to turn some of the artist’s most prized canvases into animated scenes can be impressive to behold. Paintings such as The Night Cafe , Wheatfield with Crows , Portrait of Dr. Gachet and Starry Night Over the Rhone were reproduced by a team of animators over a two-year period, using live-action sequences captured in front of green screens and then transforming them during postproduction into van Gogh’s living, breathing subjects, like zombies coming back to haunt us from a Post-Impressionistic past.

Purists of art history may take issue with such a technique of transmutation, as well as with the movie’s potboiler of a plot, but there’s no doubt that the directors have taken their subject to heart. In that sense, Loving Vincent , which is a title inspired by the way van Gogh signed his letters to Theo, is appropriate enough for an artistic homage (or is it hodgepodge?) that admirably tries to resurrect the painter through the glorious work he left behind.

Production companies: Breakthru Films, Trademark Films Cast: Douglas Booth, Jerome Flynn, Robert Gulaczyk , Helen McCrory , Chris O’Dowd , Saoirse Ronan Directors: Dorota Kobiela , Hugh Welchman Screenwriters: Dorota Kobiela , Hugh Welchman , Jacek Dehnel Producers: Hugh Welchman , Ivan MacTaggart , Sean Bobbit Executive producers: Claudia Bluemhuber , Gerd Schepers , Ian Hutchinson, Charlotte Ubben , Laurie Ubben , Edwart Noeltner , David Parfit Cinematographers: Tristan Oliver, Lukasz Zal Production designer: Matthew Button Costume designer: Dorota Roqueplo Editors: Justyna Wiersynska , Dorota Kobiela          Composer: Clint Mansell Casting director: Jenny Duffy Head of Painting: Piotr Dominak VFX supervisor: Lukasz Mackiewicz Venue: Annecy Film Festival (Competition) Sales: Cinema Management Group

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