THE POWER OF LOVE

Inspiring: Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as Richard and Mildred Loving.

Synopsis: The gripping true story of a mixed-race couple who stood against the bigots to become American heroes.

WHEN Richard Loving, a white bricklayer from Virginia, married his black girlfriend, Mildred Jeter, in 1958, a firestorm of publicity and a prominent footnote in the Constitution of the United States were the last things either of them expected. Or wanted.

Richard, as depicted and choreographed by Joel Edgerton in writer-director Jeff Nichols’s wonderful film, was a simple soul, who with his crewcut and slow drawl might have seemed like the prototype of a Southern redneck, but clearly didn’t have a bigoted bone in his body.

He was joined in matrimony by Mildred (Irish actress Ruth Negga) for uncomplicated and old-fashioned reasons. They loved each other, and she was pregnant.

However, interracial marriage was prohibited by Virginia’s miscegenation laws. They sidestepped that by tying the knot in Washington DC, only to find themselves arrested and jailed on their return home.

The judge deemed that ‘Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents . . . The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.’

He gave the Lovings a stark choice; either annul the marriage or leave the state for 25 years. They left, but secretly returned for Mildred to give birth, and were arrested again.

Their lawyer used his friendship with the judge to keep them out of jail, but told them there would be no further leniency.

Although they were country folk who yearned to go back to their roots, the Lovings were compelled to raise their growing family in the city.

A few years later, stirred by the spirit of the burgeoning civil rights movement, Mildred wrote to the attorney-general, Robert Kennedy, who referred their case to the American Civil Liberties Union.

An ACLU lawyer, Bernard Cohen (Nick Kroll), saw their predicament as perfect leverage for an appeal to the Supreme Court, and although Richard in particular recoiled from being leverage for anything, they duly became a legal precedent, a cause celebre.

Journalists descended on them. Life magazine sent a photographer (played here by the ever-splendid Michael Shannon).

AND inevitably, the grotesque notion, long enshrined in Virginia’s law, that interracial marriage was ‘against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth’, was overturned.

Loving vs. Virginia remains a landmark civil rights case.

It is a poignant tale, but then civil rights stories always are. Nichols’s great skill is in maintaining its integrity. There are no eloquent, barnstorming speeches about injustice, least of all by the Lovings themselves.

This is not the America of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? Stanley Kramer’s 1967 film in which Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn played the gnarled old white liberals grappling with their daughter Joanna’s decision to marry Sidney Poitier’s urbane black doctor.

This is an America in which you can practically hear the cogs turn when people think.

Edgerton and in particular the Oscar-nominated Negga are both superb, giving heartrendingly sensitive performances as two people bewildered by the events that have engulfed them. When their lawyer asks Richard if he has a message for the Supreme Court justices, it is a plain one: ‘Tell them that I love my wife.’

His surname gave Nichols a conveniently plain title, too, and the narrative doesn’t need much adornment either.

Maybe that’s why the picture itself is not in the frame for an Academy Award, but Nichols’s achievement should not be overlooked. He has made a very fine film.

Loving (12A)

Verdict: Rousing true story ★★★★