Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), married and then spent the next nine years fighting for the right to live as a family in their hometown. Their civil rights case, Loving v. Virginia, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1967 reaffirmed the very foundation of the right to marry.
Rather than play with the narrative in these grandiose and dramatic flourishes, writer/director Jeff Nichols actually lets it work in the quiet realities that these people were dealing with and aspiring towards.
As the story quietly drops us into small town Virginia, Jeff Nichols doesn’t shy away from the undercurrents of the time as we see them get longer than necessary stares from the primarily white population being affectionate towards each other in public. It’s never spoken about, but the tension is there and that is what makes it feel so salient. Nichols quickly goes for the core of it all. The right for two people to love each other, regardless of what anyone else in town thinks about it all.
Ruth Negga plays Mildred Loving to near perfection. She’s a small town woman who wants to marry her sweetheart and start a family on terms that her and her family are used to. Joel Edgerton on the other side of that coin is just a simple and humble man. He fights for all of that my maintaining it all and living his life on terms that gets him what he wants and what he wants the world to know.
“Tell them that I love my wife”.
…that’s what Loving is, a beautiful statement on the innate right that we all have to have love in our lives and more importantly in our hearts.
