“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a
river runs through it,” Norman Maclean writes in the last lines of his
autobiographical meditation on family, faith, and fly fishing, A River Runs Through It: “The river was
cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time.
On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words,
and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” I couldn’t help but
think of these words as I watched Jeff Nichol’s Mud, a down in the delta coming of age story that takes place in
the wide mythic space where the Mississippi opens up and the horizon stretches boldly
to infinity, expanding to encompass the whole world. On that threshold, reality
and illusion, the past and the future, the sky and the river become one, and
all things merge, pregnant with promise and hope.
But
the unstill Southern waters Nichols wades in are as murky and dangerous as the
past of the movie’s title character, a tattooed, broken-toothed bayou noir hero
who cares about honor and justice more than he’d like to admit. With a graceful,
unhurried rhythm and a rustic regional temperament, the movie reaches the patience
and picturesque pastoral sights of a Terrence Malick film. Unlike Malick, however,
the director of Mud places his
characters firmly within their setting but also above it, offering subtleties
and surprises in the way of suspense, humor, and a climax that would put many
an action film to shame.
