Mud

"3 stars out of 4...or maybe 2.75! Haven't decided yet"

I saw Mud the other day. My first impression after seeing this movie was giving it 2.75 stars. But as it sinks in, you start to like it more. Maybe that's the magic in it that sets it apart from other movies that have kind of the same story...see, when I saw it I thought that I have seen this kind of movie before...or maybe even read it, since it reminded me of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in a way. This similarity between stories is what made me somewhat disappointed in this movie and made me wonder if it was overrated. Another thing that made me disappointed is that from the trailer, I had been expecting a darker theme here. But was let down.

However, what made me change my mind and have a better feeling towards it is the acting. Matthew McConaughey has given a performance of a lifetime in this movie. He's never been better. But I should praise the acting of the young actors who can make you laugh in one scene and make you cry in another.

The other thing that makes this movie different than others is the ending. I don't want to discuss it at this point in case some of you haven't seen it yet, but will get more into it at the end of this post. So, beware of the spoiler!

The story is based in Southern US. Two teenage friends, Ellis and Neckbone, go on a small journey to an isolated island nearby, where they search for a boat on a tree they have heard of. They find the boat but find a mysterious guy living in the island, who is called Mud (McConaughey). He tells them that he's there to meet his girlfriend and needs help to rebuild the boat since it is the only thing that the police wouldn't be looking for. But what has he done and what makes him want to be incognito? They see a mysterious girl, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), back in town and know that this part of Mud's story must've been true. Ellis decides to help Mud, as his parents are getting a divorce and he is starting to fall in love himself, so he tries to help Mud's love survive, not knowing what kind of trouble he is getting himself and everyone around him into.

You see what I mean by dark? Even my description of the story seems darker than it is, now that I look at it!

There are "wholes" in the story, as Bijan Ashtari would've liked to call them. One of them that kept pounding in my mind and wouldn't leave me alone was that the people who were after Mud could've easily followed Ellis after one of his visits to Juniper, especially that they claimed they had hired someone to watch Juniper all the time. This was a huge gap in my opinion. I was willing to overlook it if the movie was deserving of more than 3 stars...but unfortunately it was not.

Another thing about this movie that I found "interesting" was that it was obviously anti-women. I don't know what kind of a problem the director had with women, or maybe even Ellis was based on himself, but all the women in this movie were debased, heart-breaker, self-involved people who were ruining the lives of the men around them. Are we really that horrible?! And the message I got from this film was that if a girl breaks your heart, just move on, because that b**** deserves it! And you can get someone better in no time!

*SPOILER* Below, you might find some info about the ending but that part of my review is frankly my favorite, so...if you don't want to find out how it ends, please come back later.

After we left the theater, my friend was insisting that they shouldn't have shown what happened to Mud and should've left it to the audience's imagination. But the thing is that when Mud was floating on the water, she had thought that it wasn't obvious if he was dead or alive because we didn't see his face! Whereas in my opinion he looked dead in that scene and I think that the director's aim was to make us think he was dead and surprise us later on. So I was happy that they made the clarification, but my friend was not and insisted that he could've easily been alive based on that shot. But whatever!

Also, what I liked about one of the last shots was when Mud comes to the deck and sees the open water ahead and smiles. It takes us back to the start of the movie, where Ellis and Neckbone have embarked on their journey and what they feel when seeing the exact same scenery, is fear of what lies ahead, but for Mud it is relief. Where you are in life makes you have different impressions on things that are happening around you. The same thing that would seem tragic to you could be the uplifting of another.

Moreover, what made me like this movie and not think of it as a cliche was its ending. If it was any other movie similar to this one, it would've sacrificed one of its main characters to make it tragic and maybe more touching. But I liked that it had a happy ending. If you remember Jon Stewart's first visit as the Oscars host back in 2006, he was saying how all the movies that year were brutal, like No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Sweeney Todd, and said jokingly "...all I can say is, thank God for teen pregnancy (Juno)!" Then went on to say "Does this town need a hug?!"

I think it is a good thing for Hollywood to give us a hug with its movies and their happy endings once in a while! Don't you agree?

By the way, isn't it nice that technology has got to the point where it saves your notes automatically?! I just hit backspace to delete something and it jumped to the previous page and I panicked saying no no no no! Then I remembered the auto-save...and relief!