This coming-of-age drama by Jeff Nichols and starring Matthew McConaughey was featured in the competition of the 65th Cannes Film Festival in 2012.
Armed with a flashlight, fourteen-year-old Ellis (Tye Sheridan) runs away from home to join his friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) on an all-night boat ride down the Mississippi. By morning, the boys reach an island where they see a boat sitting in a tree. The owner of the boat, Mud (Matthew McConaughey), tells them about his adventures and incredible love story and asks for help with food and repairs. The boys agree to help, but soon realize that Mud is living on the island for a reason.
Ellis is a modern-day Tom Sawyer and Mud—a fugitive criminal with a boy’s attributes of campfires, crosses, and a wolf’s eye embroidered on his lucky shirt—is a Huckleberry Finn. For Ellis, meeting Mud is a catalyst in growing up: the new friendship becomes a backdrop for his separation from his parents, the looming move to the city, his first crush, his fascination with the ideals of masculinity and his disappointment in them.
A thoughtful explorer of Americana, Jeff Nichols was inspired not only by Mark Twain, but also by Turner Browne’s photographic album with documentary images of Arkansas in the 1990s, from which he has borrowed the floating houses, the mussel catchers, the mud stains on the walls, and a general sense of decay and nostalgia that we can see in Mud.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Mud
Director: Jeff Nichols
USA, 2012. 131 min. 18+