Get Out confronts racism in a sideways manner. Not so with Mudbound. This is just flat out painful to watch. Life in the American South after World War II (and before) was not good for poor whites and they felt entitled to treat African Americans like their property. This is almost one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and just twenty years before the Civil Rights Act and all of it feels very real and believable. And it also seems inevitable to all but the men who fought in the war. They came home, damaged by trauma but entirely clear on the fact that only monsters treated other humans the way whites treated blacks int he South. Such a realization was not welcome, and this movie takes us through just exactly how badly things can go when you try to introduce change to a system completely uninterested in it.
Beautifully filmed (the cinematographer is the first woman ever to be nominated in that category), believably acted, and yet, it is a relief to have it finish, with an ending that is forseeable, and yet not.
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