My favorite niche, sub-genre is Movies About America. I’m a total sucker for stories that are subtextually about our Nation as a whole. Citizen Kane, The Godfather series, and There Will Be Blood spring most readily to mind, but greed isn’t America’s only defining trait. There’s also the small matter of white people enslaving black people for hundreds of years.
It’s no accident that this film opens with two white guys digging a grave for their racist father and finding the skull of a murdered slave. Slavery is literally just under the surface of this film and it informs every interaction between the numerous characters in this ensemble. The story might be set in the 1940’s, but much of this film looks like the 1840’s because The South is literally stuck in the past. Since the Civil War we have been trying to move forward without addressing slavery and Jim Crow. We are mudbound and will continue to be so until we take a long, hard look in the mirror. A film set 70 years in the past shouldn’t be so relevant, but here we are.
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