Reeling from his impending separation, Senior (Ray McKinnon) imparts the following wisdom to his son, Ellis (Tye Sheridan): “Can’t trust love Ellis…If you’re not careful, it’ll up and run out on you.” At fourteen, Ellis is smitten with May Pearl, a girl two years his senior who granted him the opportunity for one date and gave him his first kiss on the cheek to reward him for his chivalry.
And while their relationship is doomed to fail the way that most junior-high relationships do – before they start, really – Senior’s words define the overall theme in Mud. His personification of “love” dilutes the human responsibility inherent to relationships. By fashioning a third party and assigning blame to it, each party is absolved of their respective fallacies, transgressions, or missteps. This personification also creates a force of sorts that holds people together, as if they are were bound together by some sort of mystical adhesive.
Within Mud, there are a number of varying relationships that run the gamut of abusive, long-distance, desublimated, dissolving, juvenile, predatory, and avuncular. The most important one exists between the titular Mud (Matthew McConaughey in another stellar performance that proves he is quite the actor when not cast alongside the flavor of the moment) and his girlfriend Juniper (the nearly uncredited Reese Witherspoon), a girl whom he has “been dogging…his whole life.” We meet Mud at the same time that Ellis and his best friend Neckbone do, stumbling upon this mysterious, superstitious man who currently inhabits a boat that was tossed into a tree by one hell of a storm.
The first half of the film follows the common “is he or isn’t he a psychopath trope,” offering a glimpse of a gun in Mud’s waistband while equipping him with some chipped front teeth, dirty finger nails, and scraggily hair. However, the film doesn’t try to mislead the viewer. Rather, the story is straight forward and we see Mud with nearly as much innocuous ignorance as our two young protagonists. There are no crescendos to emphasize Mud’s potential nefariousness. There are no wayward glances from his eyes that suggest he might kidnap and torture these boys. He has his secrets like anyone else in the film, but writer / director Jeff Nichols doesn’t throw us multiple red herrings in attempt at hold our interest.
Instead, we are – at just the right time – given the answer to our questions about Mud’s sanity, and then we’re provided a love story, one in which the love that exists seems to exist because neither party can live without the idea that “love” for each other is their only reason for existence. Outside of two brief notes passed through Ellis, Mud and Juniper do not speak, and they only share one look at each other, but the physical reactions they connect to this “love” are powerful. In a sense, both are trapped by their love for one another. But their confinements are self-imposed.
Neither can fully let go of the other for no other reason than the potential loss signifies a lack of purpose. Juniper constantly flees, so Mud constantly follows. Settling down represents a trap, but Juniper only runs to keep Mud in motion, which makes their cat and mouse game equally ensnaring. As for Mud, he follows Juniper and attributes his perpetual journeys to love simply to justify his actions.
Mud can be taken on many levels. It is at once a love story, a coming of age tale, or a deep look at the time we put toward defining the perfect relationship, when, in reality, the best case scenario seems to be a controlled chaos.
