Best thing you’ll see all month: Loving

Not so long ago, the term for interracial marriage was miscegeny. Today the term for interracial marriage is marriage. An important step in that process was the Supreme Court in 1967 telling Virginia, “Okay, look, you can’t make laws to stop certain people from getting married.” It would take another 48 years for the Supreme Court to really follow through, but they got there eventually.

On one level, Loving is about our country recognizing that falling love and marrying is part of the human condition. But mostly, it’s about two people who love each other and decide to start a family. The man happens to be white and the woman happens to be black. But the social ramifications, the political issues, the march of the Civil Rights Movement, and all that stuff is relegated to the background. Not because it’s less important. But because that’s not the story writer/director Jeff Nichols wants to tell. A through-line in Nichols’ movies is simple characters bearing up under the crushing responsibility that comes with caring for a family. That’s what this is. For its power, intimacy, and optimism, Loving is his masterwork.

This is easily the performance of Joel Edgerton’s career. It will hopefully be the richly deserved breakout for Ruth Negga’s. The movie opens on her face. It lingers there. Her wide-eyed openness is nothing short of angelic. Her smile is beatific. How else could I have watched so much of that dreadful Preacher series? Their relationship is a fascinating conjunction of a woman before her time and a man out of place. She is the driving force when it comes to introducing their case to the legal system and presenting it to the newly media-fed public. He’s a white man born and raised in a black community, who has learned to keep his head down. Edgerton plays him with a whupped and laconic doggedness. They’ve found their time and place in each other’s arms, and that’s where Loving finds a fiercely quiet and gently powerful portrait of everything that’s right, wrong, and then ultimately right with our country.

Loving is currently in limited release. It will open in additional cities throughout the month.