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- MARK KERMODE LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP REVIEW GUARDIAN FULL
- MARK KERMODE LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP REVIEW GUARDIAN TV
When the time comes, however, for the trip to the island and a reconciliation, she doesn’t show, and can instead be found (unconvincingly) acting the role of dive-bar floozy. She’s way out of her depth, getting knocked around a cheap motel room by a hothead cop on Mud’s trail, and is loyal to Mud to an extent. The brief involvement with Witherspoon’s damaged, reluctant ex compounds and solidifies a lot of the film’s major themes. They soon become part of a murky retribution sideshow via Witherspoon that slowly expands as a looming threat to the escape plot as the kids are watched to track the whereabouts of Mud. Blake Lively?) and getting her onside for a getaway reunion. Well, whatever qualities Witherspoon has, she doesn’t have those. Backing this up is the line at one point describing her as having ‘legs that go on forever’. The other, trickier request he makes of his loyal assistants involves contacting his girlfriend, Reese Witherspoon (not quite right for the role, I’d argue: I can only guess Nichols has gone for an actress that looks childlike for obvious reasons, or couldn’t get his first choice.
MARK KERMODE LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP REVIEW GUARDIAN FULL
Mud has formulated a plan of escape that involves the repair (and rescue, from treetops – this really is full of fairly preposterous boy-scout setups) of a wrecked boat: the kids gradually scrabble together the necessary bits and bobs needed for a pretty neat fix-up job. It’s a film of vicarious ridiculousness that makes its characters too indelible and empathetic for them to be compromised by a throwaway trope: Nichols is more interested in the mindset of two kids wrestling with a volatile set of scenarios and emotional turmoil than he is with verisimilitude. So they defer to his dubious wisdom, and it’s one of the peculiar triumphs of the film that the audience can’t help but advocate their allegiance and mutual unconfinability whilst at the same time recognising and accepting the subsequent peril. He’s a role model as well as a psychological peer. And yet, things as they are, the kids understand Mud is from the adult world, albeit reluctantly. They’re in the same boat (or will be): they’ve been let down by adults and are far from conventional normality, the kids by circumstance, Mud by circumstance (orphaned young) and intent. Quickly (perhaps too quickly the fableish tendencies here are at the expense, occasionally, of dramatic likelihood) the boys befriend this outsider, largely due to the immediate unaffected colloquy they form. They tear about on a boat (this is nearly always boy’s-own stuff, adventurousness compromised by fate) and, whilst visiting a nearby island, following a brief biographical sketch of both family situations (broken, living with uncle breaking, painfully obviously), McConnaughey’s Mud enters stage left, curiously inspecting their boat as they wander back up the beach to make what will be the film’s main triangular acquaintances. Not that we see in the film at all initially, which until his second act appearance centres on two kids, one in particular. He’s always been very good (and was great in Lone Star and Contact, intermittent substance amid all the wisecracking Chippendale fluff) but now he seems to have arrived as a serious actor.
MARK KERMODE LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP REVIEW GUARDIAN TV
He’s currently a shameless suit for Scorsese and can soon be seen here as a redneck-turned-HIV-hero in Dallas Buyer’s Club (that’s forgetting an apparently great turn in cop TV drama True Detective. He’s in a characteristic environment, for all the wrong reasons, unlikely to slap any bongos. He was a beach bum with expensive hair smirking his way through 2D love match-ups.įitting, then, to see him in Mud largely patrolling the confines of an island: sand, palms, glinting water under permanent sun. Whatever it was he had – and you see plenty of it in Mud – was largely unneeded in the roles given to him.
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Or, being slightly less charitable: he seemed to prop up a large number of dismal rom-coms. Matthew McConnaughey, once upon a time, seemed to embody a certain type of surfer élan: slick but ultimately more likely to end up straddling a beanbag, corner-slumped in a cloud of smoke, grinning at something indistinct, than pondering weighty matters, such as his dwindling career.