Loving has made the journey all the way from Cannes, where its reception was positive – mostly in the way that critics fashioned it an Oscar contender. But since then, it has quieted down a bit, perhaps because it did not run the festival gauntlet as much. It is a subtle film and requires a subtle roll out. That is perhaps why the reviews are enthusiastic and not guarded – critics do seem to resent “Oscar movies” and prefer to discover the good ones without that pressure. It is often a curse, in fact, to be called an Oscar frontrunner for that very reason.
Here is Manohla Dargis from the New York Times on Loving, which she calls a critics pick:
Movies get a lot of mileage from the fantasy that we are the heroes of our own stories. Life’s regular hum — the effort and joy of making homes, having children and nourishing love — tends to be drowned out by speeches and dramas in which characters rob banks to get out of debt instead of struggling or despairing. It’s why the insistent, quotidian quiet of “Loving” can feel so startling. It plucks two figures from history and imagines them as they once were, when they were people instead of monuments to American exceptionalism. It was, the movie insists, the absolute ordinariness of their love that defined them, and that made the fight for it into an indelible story of this country.
Tasha Robinson at the Verge:
But Loving’s strengths aren’t entirely based in the characters. As always, Nichols and his regular cinematographer, Adam Stone, shoot with a chilly, subdued precision that feels a little clinical, but makes every shot feel deliberate and meaningful, even if it’s just a grasshopper in a field, or a brick lying on grass. The film’s purposefulness makes it feel even more like one of Richard’s concrete-slab walls. Loving is the polar opposite of the kind of explosive, violent civil-rights battle in Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation. It’s more about the inevitability of social change, and about the way polite stubbornness and refusal — or even inability — to compromise can be as powerful over the long term as the will to use force in a fight. Loving is more about dogged devotion than excitement or action. It’s a patient film, and it requires some patience from its audience. But its rewards are gentle and winning, and for once, a cinematic history lesson that doesn’t feel artificial and processed in every pore.
Dana Stevens at Slate:
One thing that Loving gets right in a way that few civil rights dramas do: It insists on racial discrimination as a systemic problem, not merely an interpersonal one. Sheriff Brooks and the other public officials who intervene in Richard and Mildred’s life may not be friendly to the integrationist cause, but what drives the couple out of state isn’t their pursuers’ individual ill will: It’s the persistence on the books of an unjust and cruel law that their court case will eventually overturn. Loving reminds us you don’t need to be a wild-eyed, epithet-spewing race-baiter to be a part of a social structure that perpetuates real injustices and causes real harm. (Even the kindly Virginia lawyer who first advises the Lovings to plead guilty in the hopes of a suspended sentence is, for all his good intentions, a part of the problem.) By the same token, Nichols’ film suggests that making change to that system doesn’t necessarily require a noble rhetoric-spouting hero. Two ordinary people can do it with true love, a lot of patience, and if at all possible a really good team of lawyers.