What started many of these Summer 2013 coming of age movies? It was Mud, which opened early this past summer. I got around to watching it only this past week.
When I think of Matthew McConaughey, I tend to think Rom-Com. But in retrospect, I suppose that’s not completely fair. He was in The Paperboy, and he was dark. He was in Bernie, and he was different. Of course, there’s also Magic Mike (which I never saw) and Failure to Launch and the over-the-top but enjoyable roles such as those based on Grisham characters. But in Mud, McConaughey brings a new element to the table. He’s deeper than in roles past. And he’s much more blended: he displays a juicy dark-meets-humorous-meets-
The two young boys in the movie are fabulous, both so different, but both on this path of growing up among surrounding complexities. Witherspoon shows off a non-RomCom side as well. And I just adore seeing Sarah Paulson (from Martha Marcy May Marlene).
The rest of the movie, as my sister pointed out, had a good handle on its depiction of life in a small Southern town. The gathering of teens, the angst of young love, the freshman versus the seniors, the folks in the town versus the folks outside of it, and the rural nature of “meet at the Dairy Queen on a Friday night” all rang familiar. True, finding a stranger wanted for murder hiding in a boat stuck in a tree were not familiar, but that’s just the platter on which this story of human relationships is served.
Watching Mud, though, is tiring. (And this is not a snub of my sister, who missed ten of the final fifteen seconds while dozing. (Nor is that a snub of the movie as a snoozer; it was late. We were tired.)) But there is so much happening among so many relationships all at once in the movie, that as I reflect on the story, I find myself constantly drawn to too many different interactions, trying to make sense of any of them. Ah, maybe that’s why this movie really is such a grand portrayal of life: rarely do we have just one relationship going on; instead, our lives are full of intersecting, sometimes interesting and sometimes not, emotional relationships. But maybe too this is why I was a bit disappointed in the movie: none of us has a plot-master who nicely wraps up those intersecting, complex relationships quite so nicely. Movies do need to come to an end, but when a film deals so well with the intricacies of human relationships, it needs to take care not to put a bow on that final scene, lest everything explored before then be diminished.