Garrett Hedlund | ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES

Last month I dove into the depths of horror in honour of Halloween, and among the gems, I came across Crawl, which literally had me asking: has anything good ever happened in the crawlspace beneath a house? Aggressive alligators with a taste for human flesh had me thinking no, but in Dreamland, a teenage boy named Eugene finds just about the best thing ever: Margot Robbie. I would crawl over quite a few alligators for Margot Robbie. So, it seems, would Eugene.

Like all of the people in his small Texas town, Eugene’s (Finn Cole) family is struggling to get by at the unfortunate intersection where the Great Depression met the Dust Bowl. As luck would have it, Allison (Robbie) is a wanted criminal, a sexy bank robber with a bullet hole in her leg who needs to hide out and rest up for a few days. Can Eugene help? He can. But Allison’s got a ten thousand dollar bounty on her head, and that will go a long way to help his family survive the famine. But she is a very sexy bank robber and he is a very teenage boy. So he hides her in the barn.

For a gangster movie, Dreamland is extremely slow. Extremely. And if it wasn’t for Robbie’s performance, I would probably say don’t watch it because it’s a little boring. But that Margot Robbie, she’s something else. And she’s something besides sexy, too. She’s talented. She strings us along, weaving her tales to paint herself as the helpless victim, and Eugene as her potential saviour. Allison uses her powers of seduction to get what she wants. I dare you to take your eyes off her.

Director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte signals his unreliable character with a heavy filter on his flashbacks. I can’t can Robbie the unreliable narrator because the movie has one of those too, which is a few too many cooks in the kitchen, but just enough boobs in the shower, and you know what they say: boobs always win.

Two soldiers, equally scarred by the war, return to their homes in the South, and to their families who await them. Their shared experience bonds them but the colour of their skin keeps them wholly separate. Rural Mississippi sucks the big one.

Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund) goes home to stay with his brother Henry (Jason Clarke) and his new wife Laura (Carey Mulligan), who he basically saved from spinsterhood, because that’s what we call 30 year old unmarried women in the 1940s. The marriage is not exactly a romantic one, but she bears his children and lives in a hovel raising them while putting up with disgustingly judgy side looks from her creepy father in law (Jonathan Banks).

Meanwhile, just down the road, Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) goes back to the shack where his family is eking out a living helping out the McAllans. It’s hard to really 170123-stern-mudbound-embed1_wdoplh distinguish between different levels of abject poverty, but there’s no question that the white McAllan family will always be in a better position than the black Jacksons (yeah, I feel weird writing that, so go ahead and feel weird reading it). Ronsel is having trouble adjusting to this country that demands that he risk his life defending it but then will spit in his eye the moment he’s back on American soil. Tough blow.

And Jamie’s only doing nominally better because his budding friendship with Ronsel is particularly irksome to his daddy, who’s a clansman. So yeah, shit gets real. This is not a pretty movie. I didn’t have much of an opinion of Hedlund before this but I found Mudbound to be well-acted: Mulligan, Mitchell, and Mary J. Blige as Mitchell’s mother are stand-outs of course, and Jonathan Banks made me want to spit nails. Into his eyeballs. Or nutsack. Or both. Rusty ones.

This movie says a lot about race and inequality but is largely unsentimental. The setting is sparse but the characters are rich, with great performances fleshing out mudbound existence. Director Dee Rees paints a stark portrait, accurate but not antiquated.