Loving
by Jeff Nichols
Raindog Films
In 1958, two people got married. Quite a few people did, but these two set into motion a chain of events that led to one of the great civil rights Supreme Court cases of the 1960s. Richard Loving was White, and Mildred Jeter was Black, and they lived in Virginia, where interracial marriage was not legal.
Loving was released in theaters in November, and is now on most of your favorite streaming platforms. Ruth Negga, who plays Mildred Loving, was nominated for Best Actress for her performance (and I’m not gonna lie, I was totally rooting for her to win).
Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred (Negga) lived in a tiny, fairly integrated town in Northern Virginia, and got married in Washington D.C. (“There’s less bother.”) When the sheriff of Caroline County got wind that they had married, they were both arrested, convicted of miscegenation, and told that their sentence would be suspended if they left Virginia and didn’t come back for 25 years. They moved to Washington, and lived there for years, separated from their families and the countryside they both grew up in and loved. After the March on Washington (and her cousin telling her “you need to get you some civil rights”) Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, got help from the ACLU, and their case went all the way to the Supreme Court. (Spoiler: they won.)
What’s striking about the performances of Edgerton and Negga is how quiet they are. I mentioned back in the review of Black Mass how transformative Edgerton is, and he’s phenomenal in how unshowy an actor he can be. But the real revelation is Ruth Negga. She was WOEFULLY underserved in Agents of SHIELD, and by all reports is KILLING it in Preacher, so I am thrilled to see her getting the recognition she deserves. She isn’t a showy actress, she just….was Mildred. Richard and Mildred were quiet people who just wanted to live their lives; they didn’t mean to change society for the better.
Nick Kroll played the ACLU attorney Bernard S. Cohen – a kid, basically, who’s a little out of his depth. If you mostly know Kroll from Parks and Recreation as “The Douche”, this is kind of a surprising role, but he’s pretty good. This is one of the great things about independent movies: they sometimes make seemingly random casting choices that turn out to work super well. We also have Michael Shannon in a cameo as a photographer from Life magazine, and they recreate the photos from that issue.
Now, as a lawyer, I would, PERSONALLY, have preferred a little bit more time spent on the actual arguments and working out the legal theory. But while that would have made an interesting movie for ME, that’s probably not so true for…most people? So the focus, even during the oral arguments, was on the mundanity of family life for the Lovings and what this ruling could mean not only for them, but for countless people after them.
At the time this movie came out, it seemed important to see how recently it was that anti-miscegenation laws were struck down. It’ll be fifty years this year. Only fifty years. This is not ancient history; this is in my parents’ lifetimes. This is, in some circles, STILL controversial. We cannot forget our history. We cannot forget the quiet people that shake the world. All Mildred and Richard wanted was a life together. And they got that, for 17 years. The fact that their name will live on in history was a side-effect.
Here and now, it also seems important to see what the ACLU did and continues to do, and how their lawyers are there to defend people who are just trying to live their lives despite unjust laws and an unjust government. Love wins (I still believe this), but sometimes it needs a little help.
Loving is available to stream or buy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google:Play, and iTunes.
I loved this film. Kind of sad with so much of a rise in racism in the past year or so it seems even more timely as a rebuttal to prejudice. Ruth Negga was awesome (and yes she’s brilliant in Preacher), and Joel Edgerton is my favorite actor at the moment – he can say so much with actually saying very little or being showy.
I loved Ruth Negga in Agents of Shield. When her character left, it was kind of the beginning of end for me and that show.
I believe there was a TV movie about the Loving case about 15-20 years ago? That’s where I first heard about it.
But I’m really looking forward to watching this.
@JillQ: Mr and Mrs Loving, if I remember correctly starred Lela Rochon. It was the first I’d heard of the case. I thought this movie, Loving was brilliant. Negga and Edgerton were both powerful in silence, which is an approach to acting that I value. I thought Edgerton should have been nominated, as well.
Well, 60 years ago, but your point still stands. I loved this movie as well, and like you, I’m a lawyer and would have wished for more of the legal wrangling. However, while I enjoy a movie about legal heroes, I’m glad this one focused on the actual people behind the case and the toll this took on their lives. They were the ones who were risking their safety and livelihood by pursuing this case.
For those interested in the oral arguments made before the Supreme Court the audio is available. NPR aired them several years ago on the anniversary of the case. I’m sure some google-fu could turn them up. I am not a lawyer and sat in my car long after it was parked listening to the case. It was as fascinating as you would expect.
There was also an amazing HBO documentary that has a lot of footage of the family and the events. There is also a terrific YA novel in verse out this year, Loving vs Virginia by Patricia Hruby Powell. There is even a recent picture book.
I’m not a lawyer but I also wanted more legal arguments. I very much enjoyed the film but I felt it was TOO quiet. I wanted to SEE some of the bad guys get their’s. The performances were superb and I was thrilled to bits to discover from the internet that I had seen Ruth Negga on the stage in London as Ophelia, back in 2010. She is fabulous and so gorgeous.
I saw a documentary on this a few years ago and it was great. Not sure I want to see a fictionalized account. I’d definitely recommend finding the documentary. It was amazing to hear the couples account in their own words, just your average couple in love just wanting to live their own lives together. It was beautiful.
Not to get political but you did start it. Lets be careful with the ACLU chearleading. While they have done good, they also have defended white supremacists. Supporting free speech is one thing, spending money and effort to do it for a hate group is another. If you donate to them, you need to be aware of everything they have spent money on and I think most people are not aware of that.
I’ve seen both the movie and the HBO documentary and I was amazed at how much they seem to coincide in tone. Mildred was a little more outspoken in the documentary but they were quiet family oriented people. I did like that the movie made the sheriff an actual person–wrong but not purposefully cruel. In a way it is GOOD that they didn’t focus on the court case since this was the story of Loving–the couple and loving–the emotion that brought them together and kept them going through their exile in the north.
My parents met and got married in the late 80s as an interracial couple and it’s always been crazy to me that had it been 30 years earlier it would have been illegal. I can’t wait to see the movie!
I saw Loving in the theaters and adored it. I’ve always found their story fascinating and this was a much more authentic telling of the story than that mediocre 1990s film with Timothy Hutton. I remember watching that movie and thinking they’d divorced. That’s how silly the film was. Anyway, even the locations in Loving totally looked like mid-century D.C. and rural Virginia (I’m from the area, and that’s one of my pet peeves). I thought the cinematography was really beautiful, and I liked how the film put the love story front and center. I’ve always found Richard Loving to be a bit of an enigma but Loving kind of made me fall in love with him. I was impressed that they built a whole character out of what is actually pretty limited information about him.
@Mary – to be fair, it depends where. George Schuyler and Josephine Cogdell married legally in New York in 1928. Roi Ottley, a journalist who was the son of West Indian immigrants born in Harlem in 1906, married a white pianist named Gladys Tarr in New York in 1941. In his quite wonderful book “No Green Pastures” he described Europeans condescendingly asking him whether he had ever met an interracial couple before, several years after he had formed half of one. The Loving decision affected only certain states.
@Theresa – The point of the ACLU is that they believe in Civil Liberties regardless of political slant. Which is why they’ve been called Communist and Anti-American traitors, and also defenders of white supremacists. Their belief (which they would defend the right to disagree with) is that EVERYONE is entitled to the same freedoms – including white supremacists, and religious fundamentalists, and terrorists, and atheists and communists and whatever other -ist you like. They’re nothing if not intellectually consistent.
I have long thought that “Loving vs. Virginia” is the Best Name Ever among Supreme Court rulings. You couldn’t make that up.