Powerful, if self-conscious, race-tinged drama, a long view on a pair of farming families, one Black/one White, in the violently segregated South during the WWII era. Co-written & directed by Dee Rees, period atmosphere comes thru strongly as both families struggle with difficult times, muddy terrain and brutally unequal mutual dependency. No doubt as to who’s on top or who owns what. Yet the White family, forced to live with the husband’s despicably racist ‘Papi’ at the old farmhouse, is nearly as dirt poor as the sharecropper Blacks. Hardscrabble times disrupted when war sends a son from each family to Europe. The Black family’s eldest finding confidence in General Patton’s tank corps and a taste of something like equality. The White son, glamorous kid brother of his oafish married sibling, becoming a war pilot hero. The crisis comes when they return. Jason Mitchell’s Black vet unable to readjust to second-class citizenship & a ‘Jim-status-Crow’ lifestyle*; Garrett Hedlund’s flyboy self-medicating PTSD thru the bottle. Shared experience breeds a dangerous interracial friendship; and just as Hedlund sister-in-law Carey Mulligan admits to long suppressed desires. Rees has no trouble parsing parallel plotlines, giving each scene time to make its mark before circling back, only to flub her landings in narrative confusion from prologue to climax. Frustrating when so much else in here works this well.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *As (relatively) young Black actors go, Mitchell shows the kind of easy audience rapport and power of attack missing from the screen since Yaphet Kotto in his prime.
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