Children of the South

Mud, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Winter's Bone

Living in the South for the past three years has been a wakening experience. I’ve been to counties where no public transportation exists and the furthest folks move all their lives are about as far as they can walk, hitch a ride, or travel in rusty, run down pick-up trucks. I’ve been to pre-schools with bars on the windows so the daddies recently released from incarceration won’t stop by and unlawfully take their kids. This is the southern United States where poverty maps are as dark red as they are Republican. It is also the South that is appearing with a bit more frequency on the big screen these days; not the genteel South of Gone with the Wind or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but the real, rural south that many young and talented filmmakers want to tell stories about, maybe with the hope of stirring a longing for change again.

Mud is such a movie. Written and directed by Arkansas native Jeff Nichols, whose earlier films include Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories, it is a story about growing up in a rural, poor, small town on the banks of the Mississippi, a river which is beautifully shown here in its different facets and lighting. The three-some that comprise the solid core of the movie are two young teenagers and a fugitive: Ellis, played by Tye Sheridan, who was previously in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life -a young actor that really comes to life in this movie; his comic sidekick Neckbone, Jacob Lofland in a great first role, and the fugitive, Mud himself, Mathew McConaughey, an actor thankfully back from his bad rom-com past, adding Mud to a growing list of movies where he shows he’s one southerner that can act, like he did in The Lincoln Lawyer, The Paperboy or, earlier still, A Time to Kill. 

Tye sheridan and Jacob Lofland in Mud

These are the three romantic dreamers that form a pact, spit-in-the-handshake and all, to help the fugitive evade not just the law but also the gun-toting, Jesus-praying mobsters that are hunting him down, and, most of all, evade the life of tedium and despair of rural poverty in these small southern towns. Mud is a Southern Don Quixote, pinning for the love of his Dulcinea, in this case, his unfaithful girlfriend Juniper, played by Reese Witherspoon.

Mud is much less of a naturalist realism film than two other great and fairly recent movies about kids facing poverty in the rural south:  Benh Zeitlin’s Beast of the Southern Wild (2012) and Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010).

Beasts of the Southern Wild, based on the one-act play by Lucy Alibar, who grew up in the Florida Panhandle, takes place in a Louisiana bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a levee, where a five-year-old girl, Hushpuppy,  conjures up her imaginary beasts to survive the world of despair and need she is born into. The very young actress, Quvenzhané Wallis, plays Hushpuppy in an Academy Award nominated performance worth seeing.  

Jennifer Lawrence was also nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Ree Dolly in Winter’s Bone, based on a novel by Missouri native Daniel Woodrell. Ree is an Ozark teenager who is the sole caretaker of her two younger siblings and her depressive mother, forced to hunt down her missing drug-dealing father in order to save her family from eviction.

Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone

Oh, that this were only a big screen reality, as fictional as those old movies about the genteel South! The lives of children growing up in the South are far from hopeful and their struggles are far from fictional.  The South holds the top ranks in the majority of the most devastating statistics, beginning with poverty, always aggravated by the South’s racist history. For example, in the southern states portrayed in these movies, the percentage of students that achieved a scale score in Writing at or above the level of Proficient was 18% in Hushpuppy’s Louisiana and 19% in Ellis and Neckbone’s Arkansas; just a little higher than the 13% in Mississippi, the state that ranks first in the states with the highest poverty rates: 22% total and 36% for African Americans. Arkansas ranks second, with almost 19% total, 36.4% for African Americans. These are also the states with the lowest tax rates, so not surprising that there is such little government investment in things like education or job programs to help people out of poverty. They are also the states where it’s easiest to buy and own guns, Neckbone’s main objective in helping Mud in the movie; guns are pretty much always present in these realistic movies, as are drugs.

The children in the movies are strong and resilient, growing up in the South. They are surrounded, however, by the adults they love, bearing strange nicknames like Mud, Wink or Teardrop, who were also once resilient children but have now become a shadow of themselves, the ghosts behind the statistics that movies like these hope that we will see.