Loving

Sure, there are moments in Loving where the prestige format threatens to put the more quiet, lo-fi charms in a strangle hold, but they’re easily forgiven. Loving keeps everything at a simmer, preferring to place the focus on these two very private people instead of the cultural pyrotechnics going off all around them. It’s a wonderful little movie about love trumping hate.

Telling the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving and their Supreme Court case which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws, Loving does fold too easily into a three act structure at times. There’s the opening section in Virginia where they are arrested in the middle of the night for cohabitation, a forced 25 year banishment where the relocate to Washington, D.C., and, of course, their eventual return to Virginia with three young children to contest the courts unjust and deeply racist rulings on their marriage. You already know the outcomes of each of these story beats, and there’s an occasionally overly glossy image that undercuts the dignities and strengths of the film.

Yet these moments are easily ignored, forgiven, or skipped over when Loving is taken as a whole. The two lead performances radiate with deeply excavated humanity and nobility as they go about the day-to-day business of living, marriage, and raising kids. Or the ways that Loving finds humanity in its mundane interactions between these two people. Here are two people who are deeply committed to each other, and slightly nervous about the amount of attention and scrutiny that they are getting by daring to love one another, and go to increasingly higher courts with their lawsuit.

Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga are positively exquisite here. Edgerton brings a lot of depth and nervous energy to Richard. This is a man of few words who expresses his fidelity and love for his family through his actions not his words, and desperately wants to protect them from the outside world. Negga has the more talkative of the pair, but not by much. She brings a huge amount of resilience to the part, and Negga makes Mildred positively blossom as the story progresses. In a more just cinematic world Edgerton would be joining Negga as an Oscar nominee, but he got edged out by the flashier Viggo Mortensen in Captain Fantastic and Ryan Gosling being carried in on La La Land’s giant wave.

Loving is an ever-timely story told well, with strong performances and a pleasingly subtle aura. I don’t need the flashy bells and whistles, and I frankly don’t miss them in the typical prestige picture. I love how quiet this film is, but its quietness is also probably the thing that knocked it out of most major Oscar categories. Maybe one day they’ll learn that quietness is a virtue and we can stop rewarding the more manipulative melodramas. There’s honesty and truth in Loving, and it’s one of the finest films of 2016.