Loving is the type of film you sit down to watch and after about 25 minutes, you know it will most certainly be an Oscar nominee. That isn't because it is anything particularly riveting or ground breaking, it just feels like the typical Oscar bait film. Much like 2014's The Imitation Game, this is a film that hits every check mark down an Oscar ballot. It has incredible central performances from Ruth Nega and Joel Edgerton, a timely story and a cast of who's who type thespians along with a rising director in Jeff Nichols. While all these reasons certainly sound like more than enough to see Loving, the film is lacking a key component...heart. The film trucks through it's fifteen-minutes-too-long runtime, filling it with well acted scenes that rarely ever hit the marks it should.
Telling the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple in Virginia, and their fight against laws prohibiting them from being together. First off, the true life events have laid more than enough ground work for Nichols to work with yet he turns, what would have been a great yet heartbreaking love story, into a melodramatic courtroom drama that loses all the elements of a truly well done story. There is truth in the performances, in the filmmaking, in the writing but when on the screen, it feels nothing short of a glorification. There is glory in triumphing over asinine laws that the government has bestowed upon the American people especially when it is done in film. However, Loving uses it's power against itself. It becomes sappy and hits your typical biopic beats by the end of the film.
Like I said, Loving features amazing performances from the cast, especially from Edgerton and Nega but the film conforms to the very beats of a typical Hollywood biopic instead of doing its own thing. Jeff Nichols is already known for some fantastic work such as Mud and Midnight Special but this film, while it will be his most successful, is his weakest work to date.
Telling the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple in Virginia, and their fight against laws prohibiting them from being together. First off, the true life events have laid more than enough ground work for Nichols to work with yet he turns, what would have been a great yet heartbreaking love story, into a melodramatic courtroom drama that loses all the elements of a truly well done story. There is truth in the performances, in the filmmaking, in the writing but when on the screen, it feels nothing short of a glorification. There is glory in triumphing over asinine laws that the government has bestowed upon the American people especially when it is done in film. However, Loving uses it's power against itself. It becomes sappy and hits your typical biopic beats by the end of the film.
Like I said, Loving features amazing performances from the cast, especially from Edgerton and Nega but the film conforms to the very beats of a typical Hollywood biopic instead of doing its own thing. Jeff Nichols is already known for some fantastic work such as Mud and Midnight Special but this film, while it will be his most successful, is his weakest work to date.