It's an explosive tale that's already gaining Oscar buzz, but the new movie Loving doesn't go big nor bold in recounting the true story of Mildred and Richard Loving, a determined couple who quietly made their place in American civil rights history.
It's a tactic that pays off in director Jeff Nichols' powerful film, in theatres Friday, about the interracial Virginia couple who fought to overcome the prohibition against interracial marriage in the 1960s.
'Circumstances led them to be quiet activists:' Loving tackles interracial love story1:48
The couple's landmark legal battle Loving v. Virginia was won in the United States Supreme Court in 1967. But the film begins years earlier, exploring the period before and after the pair married in 1958 (in Washington, D.C.) and showing their steadfast determination for the legal right to live as a married couple in rural Virginia — where they grew up — and to raise their children there, surrounded by family.
"I think they fell in love first and the circumstances led to them being these very quiet activists," Nichols told CBC News during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Though grounded in the romance between the Lovings, the movie includes no fairy-tale flights of fancy. Not long after a sunlit farm-field scene of strapping young worker Richard proposing to the demure Mildred, whom he's known since childhood, comes another depicting local police breaking into their bedroom in the middle of the night to haul them off to jail — all for the crime of being married.
Not long after their wedding, local police burst into the bedroom of newlyweds Mildred and Richard Loving (portrayed by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton) to arrest them for the crime of interracial marriage. (TIFF)
Director Nancy Buirski's 2011 HBO documentary The Loving Story served as important source material for the new drama, said Nichols, who added that he wanted to capture a true portrait of southerners — the region where he's from — and people like his relatives, "who don't wear their hearts on their sleeves."
Star Ruth Negga, who portrays Mildred opposite Joel Edgerton's Richard, agreed it was important to create a film with a lot of quiet moments.
"There's an authenticity in silence, isn't there?" she pointed out. "There's a sort of honesty and a truthfulness, just because you can't lie with body language and energy."
The notion 'of racial equality and equal justice and equal protection under the law' explored in Loving is more relevant than ever, says director Jeff Nichols. (TIFF)
The story of the Lovings is an important part of civil rights history that continues to resonate, according to Nichols.
"More than ever, this idea of racial equality and equal justice and equal protection under the law — which is at the heart of the 14th Amendment and at the heart of what this court case was about — it's more relevant in the present than ever."
Quiet dignity and determination: Loving explores real-life couple from landmark interracial marriage case
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