Lies on the Mississippi

Mud

Crit

You've probably read in a review that this has an oblique hint at Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in it. Well, that really understates the matter: this is the story Mark Twain would tell, if he were alive today, about a 21st-century Huck and Tom who get tangled up with an adult amalgam of the pair of them (actually, two such amalgams, though the second isn't immediately apparent) while living on a river and in a world not much changed from the 19th, except for one little three-letter word--sex--which of course changes everything.

In Life on the Mississippi (which, if memory serves, he wrote between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in fact was working on the latter simultaneous with Life), Twain writes about something he calls Sir Walter Disease: the malady to which southerners were particularly prone of reading the world through the distorted lens of Scottian romanticism. Twain blamed much of what had gone wrong with the South--slavery and the plantation system, a code of "honor" often worked out in dueling and lynching, and the Civil War itself--on the thrall of its population to the mythology of Scott's novels, and he wasn't kidding, or was only just.

The two central characters in Mud--the title character (Matthew McConaughey) and his young acolyte Ellis (Tye Sheridan)--have bad cases of Sir Walter Disease (as did Tom and, when letting Tom do his thinking for him, Huck), and in their cases the disease manifests in idealization of Woman and the inevitable devastating disappointment that that misapprehension invites. And as in Huck Finn, devastating disillusionment brings a certain wisdom, not to mention elevation of the already strong impulse to get away from the world as is, to "light out for the Territory."

In case I haven't made it clear, this film delighted me as few have this year.

Trailer

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