Loving What could be wrong with telling a story about an absolutely beautiful, loving couple, gaining the right to stand proudly married in a heartland of bigotry? How about if the setting is actually convenient for you to stage how you're finding yourself driven to imagine your own psychic reality: on the side you're on, all good and purity; and on the other, all foreboding, encroaching villainy. For if this were the case, the interest in those actually afflicted -- Mildred and Richard Loving -- isn't as profound as they deserve, and as you're pretending it to be. You're feeling anxious, and so you make use of the past and your art to stage a psychological resistance which quiets your own terrors, but remits actual people that deserved your full attention, to your convenience.
For the person viewing this film, Mildred and Richard's home offers a sort of inlet into a vast Southern "sea" of bigotry. It's recognizably attached, part of an...