Waist Deep

MUDBOUND (C-minus) - I doubt the filmmakers would be offended if I pointed out that this is wretched storytelling. Dee Rees, who told a compelling rough tale with "Pariah" in 2011, gets downright vicious in this depiction of race relations in Mississippi around World War II.

But it's all wrapped in a trite package -- a well-meaning white family (with a virulently racist patriarch) running a farm with a noble black family. Each family sends a man off to war, and those who stay behind to work the soil interact at arm's length. Upon their return, the two men miraculously flout the rules of segregation to bond over their psychological hellscapes. You know one of them will pay for that.

Very little works here. The relentless rain makes everything bleak and, yes, muddy. The cast is dull. Carey Mulligan, surprisingly, lacks a certain depth to pull off that depleted, defeated southern wife and mother. Mary J. Blige is a mere prop as one of the numb narrators. Jason Clarke is a cipher as Mulligan's lunkish husband. Garrett Hedlund isn't much more than a pretty boy as his brother, who goes off as a bomber pilot. Jason Mitchell seems a little too green and fresh-faced as the returning war hero who dares challenge the white establishment upon his re-entry.

Rees fumbles flashbacks and bumbles through scenes of war. She shows no nuance in planting a seed of desire between Mulligan's Laura and Hedlund as her brother-in-law. The overall level of quality is that of an old soap opera. The accents are so thick and the dialogue so fleeting that I had to watch this with the subtitles on.

When the reckoning comes for the two proud but damaged war veterans, Rees unleashes a truly horrific scene in which clownish Klan hoodlums bind and torture Mitchell's character, forcing Hedlund to watch in agony. It is reminiscent of the savage scenes in "12 Years a Slave," which I walked out of four years ago. Yes, it is important to remember the past so as not to repeat it and we must deal with our nation's original sin, but society really needs to stop fetishizing World War II, the segregated South and the horrors of racism. There have to be other ways to tell these stories besides the play-acting of the lashing of black flesh.

The worst part of this exercise is that nothing much is revealed or freshly conveyed about that time in American history. There is no vision (it's based on a novel), no leadership of production, and no standout performances. It's a rehash. It has pretensions of epic storytelling, but it is cliched and hollow.