REVIEW: “Loving” gives too little context, slights history

By Isabella Ainsworth
BlueDevilHUB.com Editor-in-Chief–

“Loving” is a love story, not a courtroom drama. The director of the movie, Jeff Nichols, makes this clear. But really, it is a poorly told love story and likely would have been much better off as courtroom drama.

The film about the couple who were the plaintiffs in the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia was, surprisingly, actually about the couple. It was not just about the Supreme Court case that ruled that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. In fact, there was very little (a couple minutes at most) about the Supreme Court case.

Nichols explains this choice in an interview with Gold Derby, saying that in the movie “we aren’t talking about issues […] we’re talking about people.”

He is right. This was not a movie about well-dressed white men in stuffy rooms, yelling righteously at one another amid the flash of the press’s cameras and the shuffling of incomprehensible legal papers. This really was a movie about the people affected by anti-miscegeny laws, the Richard and Mildred Lovings of the United States.

But while the acting was great, with Ruth Negga playing Mildred Loving and Joel Edgerton playing Richard, a couple of poor decisions about dialogue, character development and storytelling made Nichols’ decision to focus on the perspective of Mildred and Richard Loving ineffective.

There was very little dialogue or action; many shots just captured the expressions of the main actors silently staring out in the fields or the city. This lent a slow, almost languorous quality to the film. Although the snail-like pace likely mirrored the languor of the nine years Richard and Mildred Loving spent trying to be legally married in Virginia, it also made the two hour film seem that much longer.

More than that, though, the long looks and shots without any dialogue did not seem to serve any purpose. After watching a two hour movie with more than 80 percent of it centered around Mildred and Richard Loving, I felt like I should come away knowing what type of people they were. I wanted to know what they enjoyed, what their aspirations were, how they would act and react, and really, most important, why they had come to love each other.

I did not learn any of that. The movie does not show the process of how Mildred and Richard Loving fall in love, it starts with Mildred becoming pregnant. Their love is something that is just supposed to be taken as a fact.

Richard and Mildred hardly talk. And when they do, it is rarely anything revealing. Taciturn people do exist, but nobody is really that emotionally vacant, especially with their loved ones.

Instead of the insights and character development that I expected to see, I was treated to long scenes showing the Virginia wilderness. More shots of the Virginia wilderness, really, than I think I needed.

This is where Nichols’ decision to eschew politics comes back to hurt him. He had two hours to convey the characters and the love of Mildred and Richard Loving. He did not do that. He also, in those two hours, did not explain the history, relevance or importance of anti-miscegeny laws in the United States.

Ultimately, what Nichols did end up accomplishing was a movie with both little artistic value and little educational value. This is a disservice to history, as it is unlikely that anyone in the near future will make another movie about Loving v. Virginia. There will not be another large platform for the historical analysis of anti-miscegeny laws in the United States.

Nichols had, within his grasp, a real opportunity to educate viewers. He gave that up when he decided to oversimplify the plot.

Why was it that the Supreme Court decided to hear the case that year? Had other cases challenging laws against interracial marriage ever been appealed to the Supreme Court? How many states still had anti-miscegeny laws in 1967? How many couples were affected by the ruling?

These are only some of the many questions I had as I left the theater. The only hope is, really, that after watching the movie viewers are so confused that they look up the answers to questions like these on their own.