Rating: 2/5
Some people are not interesting enough to have a film made about them. Richard and Mildred Loving are perfect examples of those types of people.
Loving follows an interracial couple that marry in 1958 upon discovering that Mildred is pregnant. Wow, the proposal that every woman craves. They travel outside of Virginia to marry, as they know that it would violate Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law. Shortly after their wedding, the local sheriff’s deputies raid Mildred’s home and find the couple in bed together. They are sentenced to one year in jail but the judge agrees to suspend this if they leave the state for at least 25 years. Following this the Lovings break the agreement several times and catch the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union who send a lawyer to help them. The Union escalates their case to the Supreme Court, which results in Loving v. Virginia: a ruling that invalidated state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Although the story is about an important civil rights issue and the couple’s last name is ideal for a movie title, the film was an absolute bore. Perhaps it would have been better suited to a TV-movie, or a 30-minute episode on the history channel, or even should have just remained as a Wikipedia page.
For a movie entitled Loving, there was not a lot of it. Although Richard, portrayed by Joel Edgerton, told a reporter that he loved his wife, we never saw any proof of it. We weren’t shown why or how they fell in love. All we got was a grunting man and his pretty wife with perfect lips.
It seemed like an easy journey for the pair. From the film’s depiction, they didn’t appear to have received much judgment from their peers, other than a scowling black woman at the grocery store, and they managed to get on with no physical altercations. Basically, it lacked all the tension, fear and excitement of every other civil rights movie. On a positive note, it is worth seeing the film for the cutest children in show business.