(Photo Credit: Focus Features)
‘Loving’ is Love
“Almighty God created the races, White, Black, yellow, Malay and red and He placed them on separate continents.
“And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.
“The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”
Such marriages meant interracial marriages.
And such an idiotic statement from Judge Leon M. Bazile (David Jensen) meant the ammunition that Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga) needed to challenge anti-miscegenation laws all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
The movie “Loving,” based on the couple who challenged the law against interracial marriages in Loving v. Virginia is beautiful and both upsetting and uplifting at the same time.
Richard and Mildred Loving were just ahead of their time.
That was unfortunate for them at times and fortunate later for the rest of the country.
Although Richard was a White man, he had lived amongst African-Americans for quite some time.
His father had worked for an African-American man.
Richard had raced and fixed cars with African-Americans.
Therefore, it should have been to no one’s surprise that he ended up dating an African-American woman.
The Lovings only problem was that they made the “mistake” of falling in love with each other.
Their love was explosive and the film “Loving” begins with an explosive statement.
“I’m pregnant,” Mildred says.
While Mildred thinks that Richard will be upset, he is ecstatic.
He decides that the couple should get married in Washington, D.C. because it is illegal for them to do so in Virginia.
Richard has a steady job building homes and makes a little extra cash racing cars.
He even buys an acre of land so he can build a house for Mildred and the children down the road from her parents.
While awaiting the birth of Sidney, the couple has to live with Mildred’s parents until they get on their feet.
Unfortunately, the Lovings are forced onto their feet and out of bed when local police officers storm the home and arrest them for miscegenation.
Facing between one and five years in prison for breaking Virginia’s interracial relationship law, the Lovings have their one year sentence suspended if they stay out of Virginia for 25 years.
The pioneering couple moves to Washington, D.C. with friends, but frustrated with life in the big city, away from family, the Lovings challenge laws against interracial marriages all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Loving” is simply magnificent and filmed perfectly.
There is a certain strength in the meekness of the Lovings.
The couple is not trying to be heroes or upset anybody.
They just want to love each other and raise a typical family.
When ACLU lawyer Bernard Cohen (Nick Kroll) asks Richard what he wants him to tell the Supreme Court justices, his reply is simply to tell the judge that he loves his wife.
It is often said that nothing in the world happens by accident.
The Lovings were picked for this purpose for a reason and they had the perfect surname to describe their mission.
The couple was simply about love when the world was filled with racial hatred.
“Loving” is very accurate in its depiction of this ordeal except for the reason the family moved back to Virginia.
Regardless, the country is better off because the Lovings moved back to Virginia and decided to challenge hateful laws, which in no way represents Almighty God’s opinion of the races.
REGAL RATINGS
FOUR CROWNS=EXCELLENT
THREE CROWNS=GOOD
TWO CROWNS=AVERAGE
ONE CROWN=POOR
