“The Crime of Being Married.” So read the headline that accompanied photos of Richard Loving, a Southern “white trash” construction worker, and his African-American wife Mildred in the pages of Life magazine. One day — maybe today — audiences will sit down to watch Jeff Nichols’ nobly hatred-proof period romance, “Loving,” which goes nearly the entire first reel before explaining that mixed-race marriages were illegal in the then-segregated Virginia of 1958, and they’ll be surprised to learn what the crime in question was, having already observed and accepted the on-screen couple without the blinders of racial prejudice.
It is from this position of relative enlightenment that Nichols approaches the true story of “the Loving couple,” a film of utmost sensitivity, but not nearly enough outrage, secure in its position vis-à-vis the bigotry that dominated before America’s Civil Rights revolution. Like the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case that identified marriage as an inherent human right, “Loving” is a humble, soft-spoken film, in which no one so much as raises his voice or weeps in the face of undeniable injustice. Though it will inevitably factor heavily in year-end Oscar conversations, Nichols’ film is seemingly less interested in its own glory than in representing what’s right, and though it features two of the best American performances of the past several years, from Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga (neither of whom are American, hailing from Australia and Ethiopia, respectively), its emotional impact derives precisely from how understated they are.