The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jeff Nichols · a film · 2012 · the theatrical release, about 130 minutes · written and directed by Jeff Nichols
Mode
Coming-of-age drama on a working river, carrying an outlaw romance and a genre climax; told from a boy’s height, warm and plain, without irony
Mythos
The boy on the river who helps a fugitive hiding on an island; the boy who feeds an outlaw and is repaid; an ark left in a tree by a flood that must be got down to the water; the serpent in the garden, and a private religion of charms against it
Phase
One summer, from the boat found in the treetop to the attack on the houseboat, and a short coda: the boy in town, two men on open water
Presentation
Feature film in colour, shot on film, in English, about 130 minutes; photography by Adam Stone, editing by Julie Monroe, music by David Wingo; Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepard, Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson, Michael Shannon and Joe Don Baker
Register
River light at dawn and dusk over wide brown water; boys’ talk, a man’s charm, a father’s bitterness; dread rising at a pit of snakes and a shootout across the river
Scale
Two boys, a houseboat family coming apart, a fugitive and the woman he waits for, an old man across the river, a motel, a town, and a way of life on the water
Governing Proposition
Two boys on the Mississippi find a boat lodged in a tree on an island after a flood, and a man living in it who has killed for a woman and is waiting for her. One of them, fourteen and watching his parents part, agrees to help the man float the boat. The wager of the film is that a boy learns what love is from the men around him, that every man teaches him a romance that does not hold, and that a form held to the boy’s knowledge can make its audience believe those romances first and see through them after, as he does, while the river life that bred them ends.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Two boys take a small boat out across wide brown water to an island in the Mississippi, and in the green above the sand they find what they came for: a skiff lodged in the crown of a tree, where a flood left it. It is the film’s purest image, a boat where no boat should be, wonder and absurdity at once, and Adam Stone stages it with a plainness that makes it marvellous. The boys mean to claim it. Someone is already living in it.
The boys are Ellis, fourteen, played by Tye Sheridan, and his friend Neckbone, played by Jacob Lofland. Ellis lives with his parents, played by Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson, on a houseboat on the river, and his parents are parting; his mother wants to move to town, and the houseboat he was born on will be lost. Neckbone lives with his uncle Galen, played by Michael Shannon. The man in the boat is Mud, played by Matthew McConaughey, and he is the film’s third boy, though he does not know it.
Jeff Nichols wrote and directed the film, his third feature after Shotgun Stories (2007) and Take Shelter (2011), with Adam Stone photographing, Julie Monroe editing and David Wingo writing the music. It was shot on film in southeast Arkansas, on and beside the Mississippi and its tributaries. It premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2012 and opened in American cinemas in April 2013. It runs about 130 minutes, in the theatrical release, the one version there is.
Movement II
Mud tells his story. He killed a man for Juniper, played by Reese Witherspoon, the woman he has loved since boyhood, and he is waiting on the island for her. If the boys help him get the boat down out of the tree and onto the water, he will take her away in it. Ellis agrees. The ark lodged in the tree after a flood, which must be got down to the water for a new start, is the plot itself: the film is its launching.
Mud lives by charms. He wears a lucky shirt, and he has set a cross of nails in the heel of his boot against snakes and bad luck. He has a snake tattooed on him, and he talks to the boys of the snakes’ danger. It is a small private religion, comic, sincere and desperate by turns, and the film will put it on trial. Under it is an older pattern: an Eden whose serpent is the adult world.
The pattern above it is older still, and American. A boy on a river helps a fugitive hiding on an island: Huck and Jim, carried into a Southern present, with Neckbone as a Tom Sawyer of sorts. A boy brings food and parts to an outlaw who will repay him: the convict and the boy of Great Expectations. The film knows its sources and carries them whole. McConaughey makes Mud’s charm and his self-deception one manner, so that the boy and the audience believe him together.
Movement III
The summer is a round of errands. The boys scavenge engine parts and carry them out to the island; they carry Mud’s messages to Juniper in a motel in town; they go back and forth across the water between four stations, the houseboat, the island, the town and the motel. The geography is the form. Ellis’s journeys between them are the plot, and the camera stays near his height and keeps to his errands, so that Mud is known only as Ellis knows him, by his stories.
Ellis courts an older girl, May Pearl, and lives in small what Mud claims in large: a devotion that asks to be believed. Around him every man teaches him a romance. His father tells him women cannot be trusted, and is himself being left. Tom Blankenship, the old man who raised Mud, played by Sam Shepard in a few scenes that hold a lifetime, has given up on love. Galen’s women are the same law in comedy. McKinnon’s father is both hard and broken.
Meanwhile the bounty hunters gather around King, played by Joe Don Baker, the father of the man Mud killed. Their scenes are the ones Ellis cannot see, and they are staged more loosely and conventionally than the rest: a genre engine assembled at length in the middle, which runs long, and spent in one sequence at the end. The film’s law of men and their stories is truest where it stays with the boy.
Movement IV
Ellis loses May Pearl. He learns that Juniper will not come. He turns on Mud in a rage that is the film’s truest moment, because the boy’s grief is not for the man but for the idea: the romance he was taught to believe in, by every man around him, has failed in front of him, and he must keep his faith in love while learning that the men who taught it were wrong.
Soon after he falls into a pit of cottonmouths in the ruined ground and is bitten. The charms are tested and the serpent of the adult world has struck. Mud carries the bitten boy through the open to the hospital. Sheridan has carried the boy’s stubbornness and hurt with little dialogue, and here the dread of the film rises highest.
The hunters come for Mud at the houseboat. Tom, across the river, fires his rifle at them from the far bank, and the attack has a terrible clarity: a story of loyalty becomes literal fire. Mud is hit and goes into the water. The climax leaves Ellis’s point of view for genre’s, and the shootout shows genre’s seams; but the film’s two most distant elements, the boys’ banter on the island and the old man’s rifle across the river, are held by one law.
Movement V
Ellis moves to town with his mother. The houseboat is to be lost, and with it the life on the water he was born into; the move ends the film’s form, since the four stations on the river were the form. A way of life ending as families leave the river for town has been the film’s second disclosure from the start, given through the houseboat and the island’s emptiness and shown without condescension.
The last minutes are on the river’s far reach. Tom and Mud are on the boat together in open water near the Gulf, and Mud is alive. The coda gives him the escape the film had seemed to judge; it is the film’s softest join, not compelled by what came before, and it half endorses the romance the boy has just seen through. It does not undo the boy’s lesson, which stands before it: the coda spares the man, not the idea.
How far the film believes Mud’s romance, and how far it judges it, is the question it leaves open, with the meaning of the charms and the weight of the parents’ parting beside it. On return the rhymes of the snakes, the boats and the men’s advice yield more than a first viewing sees. What it made is a classical narrative of boyhood carrying an old American myth whole, told from a boy’s height so that his discovery is the form.
Act III · The Twelve
The film is built on rhymes, and the rhymes make most of its parts required. The boat in the tree is the plan and the prize. Mud’s lucky shirt and the cross of nails in his boot heel are the superstitions the snakes then test. The parents’ failing marriage and the houseboat’s coming loss give Ellis’s faith in Mud and Juniper its cause, and May Pearl lets him live in small what Mud claims in large. Take any of these away and another part loses its reason. The subtractive test finds slack at the edges: the middle repeats its errands to the motel and the island, the bounty hunters are gathered at length and spent in one sequence, and the coda is not compelled by what came before.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a boy learns what love is from the men around him, and every man teaches him a romance that does not hold, so that he must keep his faith in love while learning that the men who taught it were wrong. Mud’s devotion is half lie and half need; Ellis’s father tells him women cannot be trusted and is himself being left; Tom, who raised Mud, has given up on love. Ellis’s rage at Mud, when he learns Juniper will not come, is the film’s truest moment: the grief is for the idea, not the man. Beside it stands a way of life on the river ending. What holds the axis: the women are seen from outside, and the coda half endorses the romance the film questions.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The elevation is mostly of place, and it is frequent if not high. The first sight of the boat in the treetop, a skiff where no boat should be, left by a flood, is the film’s purest image: wonder and absurdity in one. The river at dawn and dusk under Adam Stone’s light, the boys’ small boat crossing wide brown water, the island’s sand and green, return throughout. Dread rises at the snake pit, Ellis falling among cottonmouths, and in Mud carrying the bitten boy through the open; the shootout, with Tom firing from the far bank, has a terrible clarity. What holds the axis is height: the lyric register is warm rather than transporting, the climax is a set piece more than a summit, and long stretches of the middle are pleasant rather than raised.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears load throughout. A boy on a river helps a fugitive hiding on an island: Twain’s Huck and Jim, carried into a Southern present, with Neckbone as a Tom Sawyer of sorts. A boy brings food and parts to an outlaw who will repay him: the convict and the boy of Dickens’s Great Expectations. The ark lodged in the tree after a flood, which must be got down to the water for a new start, is the plot itself, since the plot is its launching. The snakes are built too: Mud’s tattoo, the pit that bites the boy, an Eden whose serpent is the adult world, against which the shirt and the nails are a private religion put on trial. What holds the axis below the gate is that the patterns are inherited and confirmed more than deepened.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is plain: the American river novel, the coming-of-age film of children on the water, the Southern regional drama. The film’s departures are in emphasis, and they are real. It tells the outlaw’s romance as a boy’s education in failed love, so that the fugitive picture is turned inside out and its hero becomes the thing the boy must see through; and it shows a working river and its people without condescension, as a life rather than a backdrop. After a film that bent genre toward the dread of a mind, Nichols came back toward the classical: a well-shaped narrative with a star, a romance and a shootout. What holds the axis is the stake: a larger budget and cast than before, made on a proven path, so that the turn is an accent rather than a wager.
Score: 7.1 / 10
The form is Ellis’s knowledge. The camera stays near his height and his errands; Mud is known as Ellis knows him, by his stories, and the audience learns the truth about Juniper and the man Mud killed only as fast as Ellis does, so that the adults’ romances are first believed and then disbelieved. Geography is form: the houseboat, the island, the town and the motel are four stations on the river, and Ellis’s journeys between them are the plot; his move to town at the close ends the form. Told from Mud’s side, the film would be an outlaw picture and would lose the boy’s discovery that the man he loves is lying to himself. What holds the axis: the hunters are shown in scenes Ellis cannot see, and the climax and coda leave his point of view for genre’s.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The film keeps several questions open, and return finds them. How far does it believe Mud’s romance, and how far judge it? Is the escape in the coda grace or indulgence? Are the superstitions comic, sincere, or a measure of a man’s desperation? How much are the parents’ parting and the houseboat’s loss the real subject, with Mud their metaphor? On return the rhymes of the snakes, the boats and the men’s advice yield more than a first viewing sees, and the portrait of a river economy in decline deepens with time. What holds the axis: the critical yield has been light, mostly reviews and the study of its director’s work and of its star’s career, and the meanings, open at the edges, are clear at the centre.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is one of example: the film showed that a classically shaped, sincere, regional narrative of boyhood could still be made at a middling budget within American independent cinema, carrying a star, and it gave McConaughey’s change of direction one of its first serious roles. It refined what such a film could hold rather than reorganised what films can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a place in competition at Cannes, steady critical regard, a modest commercial success for an independent film, a place in the line of Southern and rural American films of its decade, and the career of Tye Sheridan, which followed it. No line of films can be shown to descend from it, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across fourteen years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, with no loss and no altered cut. Its presence is steady: home video, streaming and television, and a durable reputation as its director’s most popular film and as part of the story of its star’s change of direction. It is not presence of the widest kind; it is not taught or revived as the period’s landmark films are. The surface ages little: the river, the houseboats, the pickup trucks and the motel are near timeless in their setting, and the film’s period is the region’s, not fashion’s. Fourteen years demonstrate far less than centuries, and ordinary presence keeps the figure at the lower end of what that span allows.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Adam Stone’s photography, on film and in natural light, holds the river’s breadth and the island’s sand without prettifying them, and the boat in the tree is staged with a plainness that makes it marvellous. The performances are the film’s best making: Sheridan carries a fourteen-year-old’s stubbornness and hurt with little dialogue; McConaughey makes Mud’s charm and self-deception one manner; Shepard gives Tom a lifetime in a few scenes; McKinnon’s father is both hard and broken. Wingo’s score is light and well placed. The costs: the cut runs long in the middle, the hunters’ scenes are staged more loosely than the rest, the shootout and the coda show genre’s seams, and Witherspoon’s Juniper is given too little to play.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Neckbone’s comic talk on the island, a boy’s bravado about girls and engines, and Tom firing a rifle across the river into the men who attack the houseboat. One law governs both: men live by stories of love and loyalty that they cannot keep, and boys learn to believe them and then to see through them. The boys’ banter is that law in small, Galen’s women are it in comedy, Mud’s devotion and Tom’s withdrawal are it in earnest, and the shootout is where a story of loyalty becomes literal fire. The range runs from comedy to violence, and the law covers it. What holds the axis: the hunters’ plot obeys genre’s law more than the film’s, and the coda bends the law where it should be tightest.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 130 minutes holds. Consciousness: Ellis’s, fully, and Mud’s through his stories. The family: two parents parting, a mother’s wish for town, a father’s bitterness, Neckbone’s uncle as a second home. Love and sex: three or four couples, from May Pearl to Juniper, all failing. Labour and class: a living drawn from the river, scavenged engine parts, a way of life on the water ending. The state and the law: the police, bounty hunters, a killing the courts have not punished. The natural order: the river, the flood that placed the boat, the snakes. These move together, since the parents’ parting, the river’s decline and Mud’s romance are one summer for Ellis. What holds the axis: history and the sacred are thin, the women’s inner lives absent, and the town barely entered.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, then The Imperishable at 8.0, and The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 7.9. An old American myth built to bear load, the boy and the fugitive on the river, the outlaw repaid, the ark in the tree that must be launched, the serpent of the adult world; a film whole in its one version, its surface the region’s and not fashion’s; a disclosure that a boy must keep his faith in love while learning the men who taught it were wrong; and a form held to the boy’s knowledge, its four stations on the river the plot.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 7.0: a force of example, a sincere regional narrative of boyhood made at a middling budget and a star’s serious turn, with steady regard and no line of films that can be shown to descend from it. Above it, The Swerve at 7.1, a turn in emphasis made on a proven path; then The Sublime at 7.2, elevation of place, frequent and warm, with a climax that is a set piece more than a summit.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 7.8, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, The Imperishable at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.9, The Swerve at 7.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.0 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at Pressure on Tradition, 7.0, The Swerve, 7.1, and The Sublime, 7.2, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, from a sum of 91.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires. What holds it below Tier IV is a swerve made on a proven path, a reach of example rather than descent, heights warm rather than transporting, and a coda that bends the film’s law at its close.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Mud in its theatrical release, in colour, in English, about 130 minutes, from the boat found in the treetop to the coda on open water; it is the one version known, and it is the version scored. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, photographed on film by Adam Stone, edited by Julie Monroe, with music by David Wingo; with Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepard, Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson, Michael Shannon and Joe Don Baker. Shot in southeast Arkansas; premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2012; opened in American cinemas in April 2013. No print, screenplay or recording was consulted, and the running time is given as approximate. The plot and its main scenes are known well; the order of minor scenes and the dialogue less well, and no dialogue is quoted. Facts that could not be verified, among them the rule by which the houseboat is to be lost, how the river family earns its living, what Galen does on the river, scene counts and timings, are not given.