The story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple, whose challenge of their anti-miscegenation arrest for their marriage in Virginia led to a legal battle that would end at the US Supreme Court.
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CinemaSerf
6
By CinemaSerf
This aptly named true story follows the troubles of Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred (Ruth Negga) battling racist bigotry in Virginia in the late 1960s. This inter-racial couple are married, and she is expecting a child when both are arrested for breaching the state's strict rules on miscegenation. After a brief incarceration, he is released then shortly after she is too and given a suspended sentence providing that they leave the county and never return. Well they do for the birth of their child, but a timely intervention from their lawyer Beazley (Bill Camp) just about saves the day before the more strategic lawyer Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) alights on a plan to have them re-arrested so he can appeal the original verdict at the highest court in the land. It's a risky strategy. Only one in four hundred cases presented to the US Supreme Court are actually heard and feelings are running high in a state where white supremacy rules the roost and arguments about races all keeping to their "God-given" parts of the world are freely circulated and endorsed by large swathes of the population. This is another of these films that rather candidly illustrates just how the land of the free was anything but. The politics of toleration prevailing over those of freedom of choice, marriage or even association. Legitimate weddings (in other states) are held invalid here and these two people must, in real life, have faced quite a degree of trepidation as they did their own unique form of trail-blazing. It does miss out on quite a bit of context and the characters' predicament is presented to us without us getting to know them, how they met, fell in love etc. Not that that negates the message, but as a drama it would have been a better grounding to appreciate just why they were prepared to struggle so. It's watchable and interesting enough, but is a bit soporific at times and whilst their problems are the stuff of nightmares, I somehow struggled to engage with the cast.
