thoughts on Mud

Basically...this was surprisingly and disappointingly boring for a movie in which Matthew McConaughey plays a character named Mud who has a snake tattoo and hangs out in the woods eating beanie weenies out of a can and insists that while it's fair enough to call him a hobo, he is NOT!!! a bum. (I will admit that I, in the very recent past, have also had a conversation about the difference between a hobo and a bum. I thought it was that hobos ride the rails. According to Mud, hobos work for a living but just travel around a lot and don't have a permanent home. Learn something new every day!)

I walked into this movie a few minutes late, and for a few minutes after I got there, only the sound was working, not the picture. This was fairly disorienting because I hadn't realized I was so late; I thought the previews would still be playing when I got there, and for awhile I was convinced that not only was the picture not working, but they had started the movie in the wrong place. I quickly determined that this was not the case, but the bottom line is, I'm not entirely sure why the main character, a fourteen-year-old boy named Ellis, and his friend, Neckbone, initially head out to the woods and encounter Mud. I think that it has something to do with a boat that is stuck up in a tree, and where they find Mud living. Within a few days of the boys' initial meeting with Mud, the following events occur:

1) Ellis learns that his parents plan to divorce, and that regardless of which parent he chooses to live with, he will likely have to move out of the houseboat that he has lived in all of his life.

2) Ellis punches a high school senior in the face for getting handsy with May Pearl, an older girl who Ellis has a crush on. She is impressed, and tells him to call her if he can find her number.

3) Ellis and Neckbone learn more of Mud's story. Basically, Mud has been in love for years with Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). She has a habit of leaving him for guys who get violent with her, then returning to Mud, who takes her back and then goes and beats the most recent guy up. The most recent time, he actually shot and killed the guy. Now, Mud is wanted by the police and hiding out until he can come up with an escape plan for him and Juniper. He is also being hunted down by the family and friends of the guy he killed. So, Ellis and Neckbone agree to help him get the boat down from the tree and get it running again. Ellis does this because he is all upset about his parents' divorce and is moved by the fact that Mud claims to be doing this for love. Neckbone does it because Mud agrees to give him his gun once they've helped him.

This obviously is all going nowhere good, but it doesn't all go bad in exactly the way you expect. Basically, Ellis's parents' divorce, what ultimately happens between him and May Pearl, and what ultimately happens between Mud and Juniper causes Ellis to lose his faith in love, but then he sort of gets his faith back in humanity because Mud saves him from dying from a snake bite even though it is dangerous for him to do so for a number of reasons. And then after this, which seems to be the resolution of the movie, happens, the movie continues for something like another ten minutes and gets moderately ridiculous.

I feel like this could have used another rewrite, or something. It had potential. McConaughey's character is skeevy and possibly dangerous, which we all know he does well. Witherspoon's character is kind of trashy, which Witherspoon has done before but not for awhile, which could have been interesting. There are two main problems, however:

1) The movie is interesting for as long as Mud's story remains a mystery, and then quickly becomes boring once we learn what's going on. We spend an awful lot of time just watching Mud and the kids fix the boat, and waiting around to see whether Juniper actually sticks around for him, which we don't really care that much about. Mud and Juniper are onscreen together for a grand total of maybe ten seconds in the whole movie. We believe that he loves her; she isn't onscreen enough for us to really know what she's thinking, though a character played by Sam Shepard tells Ellis that she's no good and basically only with Mud when things don't pan out with someone else. This appears to be true, and because unlike Ellis, we don't have some deep personal reason to root for their relationship, we just don't care. I think that the Mud and Juniper characters, and McCounaughey and Witherspoon as actors, could potentially be interesting together, but in this context, they're not. We don't know enough about their relationship and they're almost never onscreen together, so we have no idea whether they even have chemistry.

2) There is all this ridiculous, over the top stuff going on that has the potential to be really wild and fun. The stuff with the snakes, and Mud being hunted down by both the police and some random bad men, and Juniper being somewhat shady...it's all there. And yet, this is mostly Ellis's coming of age story, and most of the other stuff comes to a head in a scene near the end that doesn't really belong. Everything's played too straight, like the director didn't get how over the top and ridiculous a lot of this is and decided to make a serious coming-of-age film that just happened to have all of this other random stuff in it.

I don't know if this movie had the potential to be great. But it had the potential to be entertaining, trashy, and fun, and it wasn't really even those things. Disappointing.