Director/writer Jeff Nichols is back doing what he does best: telling stories about Southerners and Midwesterners that reverberate beyond their regional boundaries. He did it with “Shotgun Stories,” “Take Shelter” and “Mud” before taking a detour into Spielberg-influenced 1970s sci-fi with “Midnight Special.”
He returns to his comfort zone with the slow-burn and calmly effective “Loving,” a film based on the famous 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case, which struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriage.
“Loving” focuses on the couple behind the headlines: Richard and Mildred Loving, who couldn’t have concocted a better last name to sum up their mission, thrust upon them by fate and hard choices, to overturn the Virginia law that nullified their D.C. marriage.
Richard (Joel Edgerton), who’s white, and Mildred (Ruth Negga), who’s black, are part of a poor, isolated, rural Virginia community where the wider society’s walls of segregation seem to have turned semiporous. Black and white kids race cars and socialize together; Richard’s midwife mom (Sharon Blackwood) delivers the neighborhood’s babies.