The Loving Story

The lengths to which some people will go to avoid living in DC, huh? All joking aside, though, this is a great documentary. I like how director Nancy Buirski is able to strike a balance between giving a legal treatise and telling a personal story, without one overpowering the other. Through her fine work various heroes emerge, both legal...the two dogged ACLU attorneys and Earl Warren being the biggest examples...and personal...the title characters, of course, two ordinary folks with an extraordinary amount of determination not to let the state of Virginia push them around because of their race. And there are villains, like the racist sheriff who rousts the Lovings at four in the morning and arrests them for the heinous crime of marriage and the even more racist local judge who invokes scripture in his legal opinion to invalidate their union. However, this is a tale of justice prevailing, albeit slowly (sound familiar to all you Trump Delay fans out there?), and Buirski wisely and properly, in my opinion, does not let the bad guys upstage the Lovings or their advocates. Give it an A.

Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred (Ruth Negga) fall in love and want to get married when Mildred finds out she's pregnant. It's 1958 in Carolin County, Virginia and interracial marriages are illegal. They drive to Washington, D.C. to get married where it is legal and return to Virginia. The state does not recognize the marriage and they are arrested. The Lovings story and their legal case goes to the U.S. Supreme Court and becomes a landmark case in marriage laws.

This is a movie everyone should see, it's a reminder to us all how different and difficult life was for a large part of the population or for those who did not follow societal laws.

The love these two people had for one another was genuinely real, and watching them and their beautiful children in the archival footage tugged at your heartstrings. I watched this documentary when it was first shown on HBO, and thought it was engrossing. I was 20 yrs. old when this case was finally decided, and I remember it vaguely. I lived in the North and had known that interracial marriage was illegal in the South, but never realized that couples were actually persecuted and jailed as the Loving couple were. The young ACLU lawyers who took the case are shown interacting with the couple in the l960's, and they also add present day commentary.

This is not meant to be a documentary about the legal machinations of the case (altho some of that is explained); but It's a compelling story about the human aspects of the case.

A classic example of an excellent document (the story of a persecuted mixed-race married couple in the 50s that went all the way to the US Supreme Court and finally changed the laws) in a not so excellent documentary. While the story and the characters are very compelling, the documentary seems to drag out for some periods and it looks more like an easy made for TV documentary than a true artistic reflexion.

The Loving Story (2011)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Richard and Mildred Loving were simple folks from Virginia who found themselves in jail and forced to move out of the state. All of this was due to him being a white man and her being a black woman, which at the time was against the law. This documentary covers this period in their life as well as the Supreme Court ruling, which would change history.

This story was turned into a motion picture in 2016 and while that film was quite good, this documentary is certainly the better of the two. What makes this one here so interesting is that we get interviews with some of the police that arrested the Loving's as well as interviews with the lawyers who took their case to the Supreme Court. We also get interviews with the Loving family, which were recorded as all of this was actually going on.

If you're interested in the subject then there's no question that you'll be entertained by this documentary. The filmmakers did a very good job at explaining what the laws were at the time as well as the entire process of getting the case to the Supreme Court. The interviews with the original lawyers was certainly a major plus as were the archival interviews with the Loving family.