Loving

I just have to vent a little before actually reviewing this film. Everyone knows who Rosa Parks was, but I’ll bet very few people who have not actually studied the civil rights movement would know the names of Richard and Mildred Loving. In 1958 they went to Washington, D.C., to get married. They returned to their home in Virginia, and not long after, in the middle of the night, the cops broke down their door and dragged them away to jail, just like the desperate criminals they were. So what was their awful crime? Murder? Gun-running? Dope? No, their crime was returning to Virginia and trying to pretend they were married, because “That marriage license ain’t no good in Virginia, boy.” See, he was white, and she was black, and it was illegal for them to marry or reside in the Fuckwealth of Virginia. (And 13 other states. At the time he was born, Barack Obama’s parents would be breaking the law to move to those states, which would legally regard him as a bastard.) Nineteen-fucking-fifty-eight! I was in the sixth grade, in the Slave State of Texas, one of the 14.

The reason for the early-morning hour of the raid? The pigs hoped to catch them fucking, which was a separate and much worse crime to the Slave State of Virginia.

The story of what they had to go though is a sad one, but it ended well. The Supreme Court eventually (in 1967) unanimously threw out Virginia’s law, as well as all the other ones.

You can’t help noticing that the arguments made against the non-crime of “miscegenation” are exactly like the ones being made today by phony “Christians” who maintain that homosexuality and gay marriage are “against God’s will.” The argument was that God put the races on different continents to keep them apart. Black in Africa, red in America, white in Europe, yellow in Asia. Any Christian out there who believes that gay marriage is a sin is cordially invited, by me, to go out and fuck himself in the ass. Repeatedly. With something sharp and red hot.

Okay, on to the movie. It is sincere, well-meant, it’s a story that needed to be told … and it’s pretty damn boring. I’m sorry, it just is. It seems it is extremely accurate in its portrayal of the two main characters … which just means, to me, that they were pretty boring people. It’d damn hard to make a movie about people like that. Joel Edgerton as Richard is the next thing to catatonic. He perpetually frowns, as though he just doesn’t get it. Maybe Richard really was that dumb and laconic, but it doesn’t make for good drama. Ruth Negga … and I’m sorry again, but she just didn’t deserve her nomination as Best Actress. I hate to say this, too, but I wonder if it was a case of white guilt on the Academy’s part over the “Oscars So White” thing the last two years. She just wasn’t all that good. But the movie is about civil rights, and it’s important, so there you go. The pace is very slow, the music is way beyond boring, and there is just this heavy-handed weight on the whole show that almost had me asleep. Sorry for the third time, but there it is. Now I hope I don’t get called racist.