"Trumbo"

Toward the beginning of the biopic “Trumbo,” National Book Award winner Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) signs a contract with MGM for $75,000 per script, making him the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood. As Trumbo inks the contract, one of the studio executives in the room praises the happy endings in his profitable screenplays and asks that he tone down his leftist politics, which are providing fodder for vicious right-wing gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (a wonderfully poisonous Helen Mirren). Establishing the tone for the conflicts to follow, Trumbo drily suggests that the man stop reading Hopper. 

The setting is America, 1947. After spending 14 years in the political wilderness during an extended thrashing at the hands of Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt, the Republican Party has re-taken control of Congress following the 1946 off-year elections. Capitalizing on their newfound political power, they have begun highly publicized show trials. The scapegoat of the moment is Hollywood Communists, people who in no way threaten U.S. national security that are nonetheless convenient, high profile targets of the GOP campaign of fear. Propagandistic anti-Communist newsreels from the time are embedded in the dramatic narrative to show the (manufactured) mass hysteria of the era.

Despite the congressional witch hunt swirling around him, Trumbo continues to act on the presumption that he lives in a free country. He exercises his freedom of speech by speaking out on behalf of picketing set workers. He crashes a u-rah-rah event of the Motion Picture

Helen Mirren as the red-baiting Hedda Hopper

Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, where he hands out First Amendment literature and confronts the keynote speaker, John Wayne—who had just finished a bombastic speech about protecting “the American way of life”—for being a macho posturer who had never served in uniform.

While his politics are radical, Trumbo lives a relatively traditional home life with his wife and three children on the Lazy T Ranch (a secluded little patch of heaven 70 miles northwest of L.A.) until a subpoena arrives from the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Appearing before Congress, Trumbo doesn’t flinch. Unlike many self-serving cowards, he doesn’t name names to protect his career. Neither does he cite the Fifth Amendment, as he has committed no crime. Rather than giving a direct response to the question of whether or not he was or has ever been a member of the Communist Party, Trumbo says, “I shall answer in my own words” and expounds on his First Amendment right to believe what he wants to believe. As he speaks, the black and white visual plane colorizes, as if to symbolize the way Trumbo is suffusing the grim and primitive with-us-or-against-us world of his foes with truth and light.

Trumbo is punished harshly for exercising free speech; his MGM contract is dissolved and he is sent to jail for contempt of Congress. When he gets out, a year later, he is unemployable,

blacklisted by all of the major studios. He has to sell the ranch and move into a middle-American neighborhood, where he is harassed with love it or leave it hate mail and dead animals in his pool.

Desperate to support his family, Trumbo takes the only work he can find, as a low-paid, grunt screenwriter for a B movie studio headed by Frank King (John Goodman, who fills the screen with full bluster). One condition of his indentured servitude is that his name isn’t attached to the scripts; his work is published under a dozen-odd different pseudonyms.

As Trumbo grinds away on stories about a man in a gorilla suit and an unlikely romance between a farmer’s daughter and an alien, the movie effectively conveys both the beauty and the drudgery of professional writing. While Trumbo is perched at his typewriter, jazz comes on like so many crackling synapses, ideas churning, and yet the work is exhausting: Trumbo smokes, slurps whiskey, and swallows bennies just to keep up, and his fixation on scripts—to the exclusion of all else—causes rifts within his family.

Despite his workload, Trumbo makes time to write a serious screenplay on the side. To conceal his identity, the script is submitted by a front, Trumbo’s friend Ian McLellan Hunter. Paramount buys the “Roman Holiday” screenplay for a sizable sum, and in 1954, Trumbo wins the Academy Award for Best Original Story—though the world doesn’t know it. The statuette is publicly accepted by McLellan as Trumbo and his family watch the event on television.

Trumbo continues to write and fix B movie scripts as rumors circulate through Hollywood about the true author of the “Roman Holiday” screenplay. Toward the late ’50s, though he is still publicly blacklisted, Trumbo gets private requests from two film industry heavy hitters

Dalton Trumbo in 1971

(director Otto Preminger and big name actor Kirk Douglas) to work up scripts for significant film projects in development, “Exodus” and “Spartacus.”

After many years of toil and persecution, Trumbo is on his way to beating the blacklist. When we later see his name in the credits on a movie screen, we feel relief, and a sense of social justice, but Trumbo is the exception to the rule. Most of the other victims of the blacklist—43 of whom were veterans—suffered creative ruin and in many cases, premature deaths.

Props are due to Bryan Cranston for putting his bankable name behind this project, and to director Jay Roach, who has brought together an A-list cast and a sharp script to make a film that, sadly, is all too relevant in 2015. All these years later, Republican attacks on The Other continue apace as GOP presidential candidates aggressively scapegoat the LGBT community, Latinos, and Muslims, showing that the home of the brave continues to be a cauldron of ignorance and fear a half century after the blacklist petered out.

Other "Truth and Beauty" film reviews:

       "There must be something in the water: the magic of 'Muscle Shoals"'

"Truth is in the Eye of the Interpreter:  a Review of 'Room 237'"

"Justice Delayed: 'Kill the Messenger' vindicates Gary Webb"

"Honest Abe Makes Sausage" (about "Lincoln")

"Errol Morris Strikes Again" (about "Tabloid")

"A spoiler-free review of 'Mud'" 

"Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood'" 

"First Glance:  'The Master'" 

"Searching for Sugar Man"

"The Wolf of Wall Street"

"The Wrecking Crew"

 "Inequality for All"

"American Hustle"

"Love and Taxes"

Justice delayed: "Kill the Messenger" vindicates Gary Webb

“Kill The Messenger” is a movie about high-stakes, shoe leather journalism.

In July of 1995, Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner)—a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News—received a tip from Coral Baca, the girlfriend of Rafael Cornejo, who was being charged in a federal narcotics case.

During the San Diego trial, Webb discovered that Danilo Blandón (a Nicaraguan citizen and DEA informant who was testifying against Cornejo) had been involved in the sale of up to $6 million worth of cocaine per week to Ricky Ross—a major dealer in Compton during the ’80s. Some portion of the proceeds had been used to support the Contras, a CIA proxy army which had attempted to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Under cross-examination Blandón admitted that members of the CIA were aware that he was dealing drugs, launching Webb on a life-altering journey.

“Kill the Messenger,” based on a true story, moves with Webb as he follows this initial lead through the mean streets of Compton, a remote airstrip in Honduras, a dingy prison in Nicaragua, and miles of microfiche. This journey is sprinkled with depth of field shots (of potentially sinister people following Webb) and shaky camera footage which amplifies dicey situations, but generally the visual language is subtle and understated, as one would expect of a $5 million movie. “Kill the Messenger” is a small movie about big things.

Webb’s year of extensive traveling and dogged research was channeled into the "Dark Alliance" articles, 

The logo for the "Dark Alliance" series
which sent the CIA's P.R. outfit into high gear  

which were published in print and online in August of 1996 by the San Jose Mercury News.

The three-day series not only pointed out that officials in the CIA and the Reagan Administration had looked the other way while members of the Contras sold cocaine in the U.S., but claimed that the Blandón-Ross connection had been the first large-scale drug pipeline of its kind and had played a central role in the crack epidemic which—along with the punitive, racially-biased policies of Reagan’s War on Drugs—had decimated inner city populations.

In the beginning, the explosive allegations were a boon to the Mercury News. “Dark Alliance” was the first blockbuster series of its kind to go around the major media filters—the networks and the big newspapers—through the Internet. To bolster the series’ controversial claims, ample links to the sourcing (audio files, court transcripts, government reports, and other legal documents) were included on the Mercury News website. The story went viral, getting up to 1.3 million hits and generating outrage in the African-American community. Webb was a conquering hero around the newsroom, David slaying Goliath.

Webb taking notes at Rafael Cornejo's hearing

For most of the movie, this is how Renner portrays Webb: as a fearless, earnest truth-seeker who is obsessed with his work. Webb walks through doorways with swagger, aggressively presses his points home when challenged, and packs heat to protect his family.

But Goliath turned out to be a sleeping giant. After overlooking CIA connections to drugs for decades and ignoring the "Dark Alliance" story for several weeks, the Big Three (the New York Times, L.A. Times, and Washington Post), all of whom relied heavily on CIA officials for national security reporting, went after Webb and his series. The L.A. Times, a major daily which had been scooped in its own backyard by a second-tier newspaper, was particularly vicious, putting together a hit team of 17 people to comb every word of Webb’s articles in a blatant attempt to discredit the series—and Webb himself. 

In time, even as Webb was strengthening the claims made in his original series with additional research and interviews—evidence which his newspaper never published—the Mercury News’ corporate heads got weak in the knees from pressure exerted by the CIA and its media allies. Webb, who won Journalist of the Year from the Bay Area Society of 

An explosive story idea is pitched in secret

Professional Journalists at the end of 1996, was demoted just months later to a satellite office in Cupertino, 150 miles away from his family. The Mighty Wurlitzer—the ability of the CIA to program the U.S. media like a player piano—remained undeterred.

Broken down, humiliated, and blacklisted in his chosen profession, Gary Webb committed suicide in 2004.

“Kill the Messenger” is effective at conveying these main facts, but the number of important things which are left out reflect the limitations of the biopic genre to tackle complicated historical events.

As shown by the findings of the Iran-Contra investigation, the report of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations headed by John Kerry, the CIA Inspector General's report of 1998, and the National Security Archive release of Oliver North's diaries, in 2004, there is no question that dozens of Contras sold drugs in the U.S., that members of the CIA and Reagan Administration knew this and ignored it, and that the Reagan Administration fought to hide this information from the public.

What “Kill the Messenger” doesn’t do is probe the more disputable elements in the “Dark Alliance” series in great depth. How accurate was Webb’s speculation on the precise years of Blandón and Ross’s business relationship and the resulting extrapolation of the amount of cocaine that passed between them? What portion of the sales went to the Contras and what portion went back into Blandón’s pocket? Were these transactions—when coupled with Ross’s eventual countrywide expansion—enough to set off the crack explosion, as the series claimed, or were they just one part of a much bigger phenomena? To what extent did Webb’s book (“Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion”), which

included much more expansive sourcing than the original newspaper story, clear up these questions?

And Renner’s characterization focuses on Gary Webb the alpha journalist to the exclusion of other dimensions of Webb’s personality. The two times I saw Webb speak at Bay Area journalism events, I witnessed a relaxed demeanor and a sharp sense of humor (often mentioned by family and friends) which are mainly absent in the movie. Webb’s bi-polarity, the struggles with depression which led him to take his own life, also get short shrift.

Despite these gaps in the storyline, Jeremy Renner and the other principals behind “Kill the Messenger” deserve a public service award for bringing this project to fruition. “Kill the Messenger” is a substantial movie which honors an exceptionally brave journalist who put his livelihood on the line for the public’s right to know.

Toward the end of the movie, as Webb sits in a ballroom about to receive an award, he hears his name announced. He imagines a standing ovation, only to mount the podium to scattered applause. In a just world, “Kill the Messenger” would be playing in Multiplexes, waking the sleepwalking masses up to hidden histories in their midst.

As it is, Renner’s labor of love won’t get a fraction of the attention—from the media or the Academy—that have attended other movies about momentous journalism such as “All the President’s Men.” Eighteen years after it was published, the revelations of the “Dark Alliance” series have been completely swept under the rug. While the Woodward-Bernstein takedown of President Nixon was said to prove that “the system works,” the tepid reception of “Kill the Messenger” shows that in the case of the Contra-crack-cocaine story, the system failed.

***

           

GARY WEBB’S JOURNALISTIC AWARDS (courtesy of Wikipedia)

College journalism:

• 1975 — First place, specialty column, Kentucky Intercollegiate Press Assn.
• 1977 — Third place, specialty column, Kentucky Intercollegiate Press Assn.
  
• 1977 — Third place, non-editorial cartooning, Kentucky Intercollegiate Press Assn.

Reporting:

• 1980 — Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Award, small newspaper division.
• 1980 — Laurel, Columbia Journalism Review.
• 1980 — Gerald M. White Memorial Prize for Investigative Reporting, Cincinnati SDX.
• 1980 — Investigative Reporters and Editors Award (IRE) for co-authoring a 17-part series at the Kentucky Post in Covington, Kentucky with Tom Scheffey on organized crime in the American coal industry. 
• 1981 — First place, investigative reporting, Kentucky Press Assn.
• 1981 — Second place, deadline news reporting, Cincinnati SDX.
• 1981 — Third place, investigative reporting, Cincinnati SDX.
• 1982 — Third place, investigative reporting, Kentucky Press Assn.
• 1983 — First place, municipal reporting, Kentucky Municipal League.
• 1983 — Reporter of the Month, Scripps Howard Newspapers.
• 1984 — Second place, series, Ohio Associated Press Assn.
• 1984 — Third place, series, Ohio Associated Press Assn.
• 1985 — Laurel, Columbia Journalism Review.
• 1985 — First place, investigative reporting, Northeast Ohio SDX.
• 1986 — Honorable mention, enterprise reporting, Ohio Associated Press Assn.
• 1986 — Honorable mention, series, Ohio Associated Press Assn.
• 1986 — First place, investigative reporting, Northeast Ohio SDX.
• 1986 — Gold Medal, health reporting, American Chiropractic Assn.
• 1987 — First place, legal reporting, Ohio Bar Assn.
• 1987 — Second place, spot news, Central Ohio SDX.
• 1987 — Third place, projects, Central Ohio SDX.
• 1987 — Honorable mention, features, Central Ohio SDX.
• 1987 — Freedom of Information Award, Central Ohio SDX.
• 1987 — First place, investigative reporting, Ohio Associated Press Assn.
• 1988 — First place, investigative reporting, Ohio Associated Press Assn.
• 1989 — Honorable mention, features, Central Ohio SDX.  

  

  The scoop that would
  change Webb's life

• 1989 — First place, series, Central Ohio SDX.
• 1990 — Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting awarded to the San Jose Mercury News staff for its detailed coverage of the October 17, 1989, Bay Area earthquake and its aftermath.
• 1993 — Second place, series, Peninsula Press Club.
• 1994 — H.L. Mencken Award, by The Free Press Association for the series in the San Jose Mercury News on abuses in the state of California's drug asset forfeiture program.
• 1995—California Journalism Award, Center for California Studies, CSU.
• 1995 — Honorable mention, Gerald Loeb Award, UCLA School of Business.
• 1995 — First Place, local news reporting, Peninsula Press Club.
• 1996 - James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College, City University of New York.
• 1996 — Freedom Fighter Award, California NAACP.
• 1996 — Journalist of the Year, Bay Area Society of Professional Journalists.
• 1997 — Media Hero Award, from the 2nd Annual Media & Democracy Congress.

Literary:

• 1998 — Firecracker Alternative Book (FAB) Award, politics, Dark Alliance.

  

  Webb with some of his "Dark Alliance" research

• 1998 — Nominee, Best Nonfiction Book, Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, Dark Alliance.
• 1998 — Finalist, PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, Dark Alliance.
• 1999 — Oakland PEN First Amendment Award, Dark Alliance.
• 2002 — 25 Books to Remember, New York Public Library, Into the Buzzsaw (contributor)
• 2003 — Rouse Award for Press Criticism, National Press Club, Into the Buzzsaw (contributor)

"Inequality for All" and the elephant in the room

I paid $12.50 for my ticket to "Inequality for All," a new documentary about income inequality in America. The ticket, popcorn, and soda were upwards of $25. 

Ponying up for the occasional night out is no big deal, but it illustrates one of the major points of "Inequality for All":  as my wage remains flat, everything around me gets more expensive. I can handle this type of small extravagance because I'm childless with no debt, but for working families with children, family movie night could be economically problematic.

"Inequality for All" was playing at San Francisco's Metreon, a local multiplex. As people filled screening rooms to see forgettable fare such as "Runner, Runner" and "Baggage Claim," the audience for "Inequality for All"--a film of substance and import--was small. I walked in a few minutes before showtime and had my choice of seats. Most of the forty or so people spread around were academic-looking Bay Area Baby Boomers who already knew the score - I imagined trees falling in a forest.

It's easy to see why escapism rules the day. Evil never sleeps, as Paul Krassner once said, and most political documentaries are exercises in impotent rage. Many people, particularly those working a stressful full-time job, would rather lose themselves in spectacle than "take their medicine" at the movie theater. 

"Inequality for All" tries a different approach. The movie contains depressing information,

but its story is told through the warm, engaging presence of Robert Reich, the first Labor Department secretary and conscience of the Clinton Administration. Though dead serious about income inequality (he has studied and written about the subject for decades), Reich is mild-mannered, with a good sense of humor and an underlying humanism.

In a lecture in front of a big "Wealth and Poverty" class at UC-Berkeley, speeches at a Berkeley rally and a union meeting, and snippets from a one-on-one interview, Reich explains the history and causes of economic inequality without taking partisan shots.

Reich is a committed capitalist who acknowledges that some degree of inequality is inevitable to reward hard work and ingenuity. But income inequality in the United States is extreme. The U.S. has the most inequality in the developed world, an income gap between rich and poor comparable to that found in Uruguay, Jamaica, and Cameroon.

Americans work more hours than anyone else in the first world, and though their productivity has steadily increased over the years, wages for most have stagnated due to the

decline of unions and the downward pressure on pay scales brought by globalization. In 1978, the top 1% of Americans made $390,000 annually, while the average worker earned $48,000 (in today's dollars). By 2010, the average worker made just $34,000, while the median one-percenter had an income in excess of a million dollars. And the 400 richest Americans today have more money than the bottom 50%.  
Reich shows direct correlations between excessive CEO compensation and both inequality and economic stagnation for average Americans. The movie profiles a handful of struggling families to put a human face on the ways in which working Americans fall behind as the cost of housing, healthcare, education, and childcare rise faster than incomes. 

Technological change plays a role in the sluggish job market. Though Amazon.com clears a huge volume of product, it has just 60,000 employees. If Amazon's merchandise was sold merchant-by-merchant, 10-15 times that many people could be employed. Also, with capital flowing so freely across borders, opportunistic U.S. companies outsource jobs to the lowest bidder, to countries with cheap labor costs and lax regulations, in a race to the bottom. 

But technology isn't the only culprit; income inequality in the United States is to a large degree man-made. As Reich points out, there's no such thing as a pure free market. Every country regulates certain sectors of the economy and deregulates other areas. 

The question becomes: what rules are made, and whom do those rules benefit? 

Over the past 35 years, the rules have shifted greatly in favor of the wealthy and business interests, to the detriment of society at large. Due to loopholes and tax

breaks on investor income, many of the 1%--such as presidential candidate Mitt Romney, whose tax rate was under 14%--pay effectively lower rates than working-class Americans. Despite the stark contrast in job growth after Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich (21,000,000 new jobs) and George W. Bush lowered taxes on the rich (-646,000 jobs), the right continues to claim that increasing taxes on the wealthy (the "job creators") will hurt economic growth.    

Nick Hanauer, a wildly successful and civic-minded entrepreneur, begs to differ. According to Hanauer, customers are the major job creators, as consumer spending is 70% of the economy. While a representative member of the 1% has 30 times the income of the average American, they often own just one or two cars, one or two houses, etc. The bulk of their money doesn't generate any economic activity; it sits in investment accounts, what Hanauer refers to as "underutilized capacity." 

The American economy grows from the middle out, not the top down. When Americans are

employed, they have money. When they have money, they buy goods. When they buy goods, jobs are created to meet consumer demand. When jobs are created, those new employees spend money too. The heightened economic activity increases tax revenue, which enables the government to invest in education, producing a better-educated, higher-paid job force, and so on, in a virtuous cycle.

Government policy in '50s America provides a sharp contrast to our Social Darwinist present and a glimpse at how things could be with the right political leadership and governing priorities. 

During that decade--the high point of America's middle class--unionization was at its peak (a third of American workers were unionized); most workers had stable jobs and wages and the ability to support a family with one income. The federal government invested heavily in education, which generated a marked increase in Americans with degrees; by the late '50s, the U.S. had the best-educated workforce in the world. And Republican Dwight Eisenhower kept tax rates on the richest Americans at 91%. The 1% did fine, but so did most other Americans. How times have changed.

***

"Inequality for All" is informative and accessible, but avoids the elephant in the room:  the

Occupy - Portland

direct and aggressive role the Republican Party and its benefactors have played in magnifying all of the ugly trends identified in the movie.

The film mentions that UC-Berkeley, where Reich teaches, had free tuition in the '60s, tuition of just $700 (in today's dollars) in the '70s, and now has tuition of $15,000 for in-state students. This fact is wheeled out, but the reasons for the skyrocketing tuition (decades of cuts to education spending initiated by state and federal Republican politicians and activists) go unmentioned. 

The effect of inequality and economic stagnation on social polarization--as reflected by Occupy on the left and the Tea Party on the right--comes up, but no contrast is drawn between these movements. The viewer could easily presume that both are grassroots in nature, with equally valid grievances. No attempt is made to explain how the corporate-funded Tea Party has benefited some of the very same economic elites who contributed to the 2008 crash and continue to make working Americans' lives so difficult. 

Due to an insistence on being non-threatening to a broad audience, "Inequality for All" leaves us short of realistic political strategies for reducing economic inequality. While explaining how floods of campaign cash, low tax rates on the wealthy, austerity policies, and the disintegration of unions have driven economic inequality to record highs, the filmmakers fail to provide the simple and essential context that one party and one side of the political spectrum are overwhelmingly to blame for these developments and show no signs of reversing course. Lacking a diagnosis of the cancer that ravages our political system, "Inequality" offers no clear prescription for curing what ails us. 

Despite these man-made challenges, Reich is optimistic about the future. Progressive

change is hard to come by in the United States due to checks and balances and entrenched interests, but dark (or just plain uneventful) stretches of American history have been interrupted every few decades by periods of reform, from the Progressive era to the '30s to the '60s to January 1, 2014, when the United States will take the first step toward universal healthcare coverage.

As Winston Churchill said, "Americans always do the right thing eventually - after they've exhausted all other possibilities."

***

                                                 Other "Truth and Beauty" film reviews:

                                                                  "A spoiler-free review of 'Mud'"        

 "Truth is in the Eye of the Interpreter:  a Review of 'Room 237'"

"No!"

"Searching for Sugar Man"

"Honest Abe Makes Sausage" (about "Lincoln")

"First Glance:  'The Master'"

"Errol Morris Strikes Again" (about "Tabloid")

A spoiler-free review of "Mud"

One can tell from Matthew McGonaughey's appearance that "Mud" is an authentic film. For the entire running time his model looks are obscured behind matted hair, a dirty, scruffy, sunburned face, and the clothes he never changes out of:  jeans, a soiled white shirt, workman's boots with a cross in the tread. His close connection to the earth is solidified by his name, Mud. He is on the lam from both the law and a vengeful posse.

The two young boys who discover Mud in the woods are Ellis and Neckbone, who present the kind of character contrast that makes for good buddy narratives. Ellis, who is from an intact (if conflict-ridden) family and has an idealistic faith in the cure-all power of romantic love, is eager to help Mud re-unite with the love of his life, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), despite the danger in the mission. Neckbone, a skeptical latchkey kid, lives with a laid-back musician-uncle with little knack for parenting. "Neck," as he's called, goes along for the ride despite his doubts about Mud.  

"Mud" has parallels to "The Tree of Life," which also starred Tye Sheridan (Ellis). Much of the movie follows Ellis and Neckbone as they wander all over the outdoors, slipping under fences, sidestepping snakes, picking through a junkyard, independent and yet still unformed, perplexed by the complicated adult world.  

There's a raw physicality in the terrain of "Mud." The setting in backwoods Arkansas has a

visual color scheme dominated by earth tones. The camera eye alternately moves along the river at the center of the story or under tree cover, presenting big expansive spaces that communicate the infinity of the natural world or close-ups with blurred backgrounds. Rich images abound, including dappled sunlight, grainy underwater footage, a cracked, dry riverbed, fish heads in a bucket, birds flying free against a blue sky.

The rural inhabitants of "Mud" are tied to a landscape that feels safe and familiar to them, frozen in time. Ellis's family lives in a riverside house which has been passed down to his mother, while his father sells fish out of the back of a pick-up truck. Old school honor coincides with a Wild West potential for sudden violence; Mud's vigilante pursuers kneel in a hotel room as they pray for his death. 

As in many small towns, the adult characters appear to know a lot about their neighbors' pasts, but this information is only revealed to the viewer in bits and pieces, which maintains a sense of mystery. What's Mud's story? How did he end up a fugitive hiding out in the woods? Should Mud invest all of his energy in Juniper? Does she really love him? Should Ellis and Neckbone be putting their lives on the line for Mud?   

Then there's Tom Blankenship, a lone wolf who lives on the river, played by Sam Shephard.

As one character says, "Tom's had lives you never even knew." Who is Blankenship and what are his motivations?

These intertwining threads are masterfully woven in a leisurely, organic fashion which gives the viewer time to become familiar with flesh-and-blood characters through their mannerisms, dialogue, interplay, and back stories.

When events take over in the last section of the movie, the stage has been carefully set; the suspense builds and releases in a way that doesn't feel grafted on for cheap thrills. 

The ending ties up loose ends a little too neatly for my taste, but this is a mere quibble. "Mud" is one of the most rewarding character-driven American films of the past five years. 98% of critics can't be wrong.

                                             Other "Truth and Beauty" film reviews:

"Truth is in the Eye of the Interpreter:  a Review of 'Room 237'"

"No!"

"Searching for Sugar Man"

"Honest Abe Makes Sausage" (about "Lincoln")

"First Glance:  'The Master'"

"Errol Morris Strikes Again" (about "Tabloid")