Film review: Loving (12A)

In Loving, however, he confronts the historical injustices of the South head-on with a dramatisation of the abhorrent case against Richard and Mildred Loving, a mixed-race couple living in Virginia in the 1950s who were forced to leave the state upon threat of imprisonment after illegally marrying each other.

Respectively played by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga, the Lovings’ ordeal played out against the backdrop of the swelling civil rights movement, but Nichols smartly zeroes in on the couple themselves to show the toll taken on ordinary people when the forces of history conspire against them for being true to their feelings.

Stripped of any melodrama, the film does a good job of laying out the particulars of the case and the significance it had in terms of challenging the US constitutional ban on interracial marriage.

But there’s no denying it’s a film built around the performances and here both Edgerton (subdued, monosyllabic) and Negga (who picked up an Oscar nomination for the film) excel without the need for grandstanding speeches or false heroics.