TYE SHERIDAN, MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, AND JACOB LOFLAND IN MUD

Keeping secrets and growing up

The increasingly ubiquitous and ever more satisfying Matthew McConaughey is the temptation and excitement for two southern boys in Mud, the title designating the man's symbolically tarnished name. You know McConaughey has arrived when Sam Shepard appears playing his father. Or the closest thing to a father this romantic outcast has ever known. And you know this is a tale of adolescent disillusionment when two boys rush back and forth to a man hiding out on an island. There is a motorboat mysteriously caught high up in some trees by an Arkansas flood. That boat will come down and the man will sail away, if he survives, but the more loyal and passionate of the two boys, Ellis (Tye Sheridan of The Tree of Life) will be left in the lurch. This movie is by Jeff Nichols, and it hasn't the crazy power of his last one Take Shelter, but in its seeming simplicity is growing accomplishment. Mud effortlessly achieves a nice sweet rhythm and is long on classic southern atmosphere and good performances. It could have done with more narrative economy, but to compensate, its sense of the world of boyhood is acute.

Ellis and his best mate Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) head toward a big wide opening in the river in their outboard motor and it's like Lighting Out for the Territory. They have designs on the boat up in the tree, but Mud appears out of nowhere to claim it. He weaves lovely stories and cuts a deal to have the boys help him. They'd have paid him, of course, for this privilege. After a while it emerges that he's hiding here because he's wanted for killing a man in anger for misusing a lady. The boys have to help him evade the bounty hunters who're after him and unite him with his true love Jupiter (Reese Witherspoon).

The boys are only 14, but Ellis, hell bent on growing up, keeps socking boys or men bigger then he is, he picks as a girlfriend (Bonnie Sturdivant) who's an upperclassman in high school, and his parents (Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson) are breaking up, filling him with disillusion and insecurity. Mud packs in the coming-of-age ordeals, but the toughest is realizing that Mud isn't a good man and rarely tells the truth. For an easy example: Tom Blankenship (Shepard), Mud says, went to Yale and was a hit man for the CIA. Actually he was a sharpshooter for the Army.

Ellis' trips back and forth up the river to the island, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by the more cynical Neckbone, feed the same kind of fragile dreams all boys tend to have, dreams that boys who live in a wild natural environment like this tidewater basin can explore more freely than most. These boys also may be freer because of their family's marginal existence. Neckbone has no real family. He's raised by his dubious and harsh uncle Galen (Michael Shannon). Ellis' dad barely makes ends meet diving for fish and selling them. Like the 12-year-old protagonist of Chris Menges' 1992 Florida drama Chris Cross, Ellis is making himself day by day, and Mud is a fragile metaphor, whom Peter Debruge of Variety calls " a wily figure of endangered Southern chivalry." Mud swears eternal love and eternal loyalty. But when push comes to shove, he lacks the security to carry out these promises. Maybe Ellis will make something out of them when he grows up -- if that doesn't come too soon. He reads his romanticism and belief in love into Mud. But that has to bear the disreputableness of Mud's life, and the threat of vigilante justice represented by Joe Don Baker, father of the man he killed.

As Mike D'Angelo, who first saw Mud at Cannes last year feeling it misplaced there because of its conventional "ripping yarn," perceptively describes McConaughey as playing Mud as if "Tom Sawyer had grown up and gone horrifically wrong, effortlessly projecting rascally charm with a hint of underlying menace." McConaughey has one of his best and richest southern characters here, far beyond the simple unctuousness of his Bernie or Magic Mike roles. And what makes Mud as good as it is comes from the additional fact that he's not even who it's all really about. There's even a shootout, and a snake bite death scare, and Nichols has welded it all seamlessly together -- if he had only, as I said, pared it down a bit; but this is the South, and growing up can't be rushed.

Mud debuted at Cannes and was shown at Sundance Jan. 2012, opening in US theaters 26th April 2013 (US), 1 May (France: excellent reviews, Allociné press rating 4.0) and 10 May (UK).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.