‘Loving’ a strong drama about a landmark case

The Lovings were simple people who never expected to do anything flashy enough to be dramatized on a movie screen.

[...] their case eventually made it all the way to the Supreme Court and to an important 1967 decision that prohibited states from denying the right of interracial couples to marry.

In recounting the history, writer-director Jeff Nichols takes an approach that makes “Loving” a little more interesting than you might expect, but also slightly less satisfying.

At the start of the film, Mildred (Ruth Negga) is a very young black woman, who knows nothing outside her family and her small rural community, and Richard (Joel Edgerton) is monosyllabic, white and wary.

Five weeks later, back home in Virginia, the door to their bedroom is kicked open in the middle of the night, and the police shine their flashlights at them.

The atmosphere of “Loving,” the feeling it evokes, is the film’s most distinct quality.

The mood is somber and restrained, and the characters — not just the principals, but the people they know — seem beaten down.

Negga, who is of Irish and Ethiopian descent, finds warmth and a sense of purpose in Mildred, two qualities that are radiantly apparent in the real-life Mildred, as seen in news footage from the time.

For the most part, though, these are unlikely heroes, hardly heroes at all, but rather good and nice people whose fortunes become hostage to the times in which they live — the still-racist 1950s South and later, the emerging modern era of the 1960s.

[...] characters are not the usual stuff of drama, and we end up partly missing the familiar dramatic elements, of people working consciously and diligently toward a specific, worthy goal.