Joel Edgerton puts in a career best performance in a delicate yet intense story of race relations

REVIEW: He’s white. She’s black. Joel Edgerton’s latest film is a quietly sobering and shocking true story of a couple who follow their hearts.

Loving (PG)

Director: Jeff Nichols (Mud)

Starring: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Nick Kroll, Martin Csokas, Bill Camp.

Rating: Four stars

Saying ‘I do’ to a world that says ‘You don’t

It has been often said that home is where the heart is.

In the quietly sobering and shocking true story told by Loving, two people followed their hearts, and found themselves unable to return to their rightful home for almost a decade.

The year is 1958. In the dead of night in a small town in rural Virginia, the police are on the move.

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Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga) and Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) in Loving.

The officers of the law congregate outside a house on a lonely back road. One by one, they silently file inside.

A door at the end of a hall is forced open. A man and a woman are unceremoniously hauled from the bed they are sharing.

The couple is taken outside, placed in separate police cars, and transported to the nearest available holding cells.

Their crime? Richard and Mildred Loving went and got married. How is that a crime, you ask? Richard is white. Mildred is black.

Like 15 other American states at the time, Virginia enforced laws that strictly prohibited licensed unions between those of differing racial backgrounds.

Richard (played by Joel Edgerton) thought that he had respectfully circumvented the law — paradoxically known as the Racial Integrity Act — by taking Mildred (Ruth Negga) to the city of Washington and marrying her there.

The authorities in Virginia at that time were hardly impressed by the Lovings’ dual shows of affection and initiative. Come hell or high water, they were going to be made examples of, lest others follow their lead.

Their crime was getting married.

Richard and Mildred were hauled before a judge, slapped with suspended jail sentences, and banished from the state of Virginia for 25 years.

Having been ripped from the close-knit community of family and friends in which they were both born and raised, Richard and Mildred were forced to go it alone in so many more ways than one.

A work distinguished by its distinct focus and delicate intensity, Loving has little time for the usual tropes that accompany factual dramas with fires in their bellies.

There are no big speeches, grandstanding theatrics or manipulative musical accompaniment.

Writer-director Jeff Nichols has clearly done his research on what ultimately become a legal case of great significance to modern American race relations. (The parallels to recent events in the US regarding the issue of same-sex marriages will also not be lost on viewers.)

Joel Edgerton puts in a career best performance.

What Nichols finds in his close character study of Richard and Mildred Loving is rebellion in its purest, most dignified form.

Throughout the film — which culminates in a tumultuous 1967 Supreme Court hearing — the Lovings are understandably bewildered by the injustices forced upon them. But not once do they allow themselves to become belittled by their plight.

The poignantly precise performances of Negga (a revelation on several fronts, not the least of which is her command of the reaction shot) and Edgerton (whose career-best work here shares the same rigorously methodic DNA as recent Oscar winner Casey Affleck) blend beautifully with the noble intentions so fully realised here.

Originally published as Joel Edgerton puts in a career best performance in a delicate yet intense story of race relations