Dee Rees’s period drama Mudbound, which is now available to watch on Netflix, opens with a scene that sets the tone for everything that follows. In the Mississippi Delta during the mid-1940s, two white brothers struggle to dig a plot on the family farm where they can bury their father’s corpse. Excavating the earth, they uncover the skull of someone who’d been buried in this location some time before. The skeleton belongs to a former slave, one of the brothers declares, because it contains a bullet hole in the skull—the person must have been shot while trying to run away. The men debate whether to bury their father in a slave’s grave; the father, a racist, would have resented knowing that he would be interred where a black body had lain. But a violent storm is brewing and the men don’t have time to dig another plot, and so they bury him there regardless, requesting the help of a black neighbor to help lower his body into the ground.
When the United Sates enters into World War II, both Jamie and Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), the Jacksons’ oldest son, enlist in the armed forces. Jamie becomes a fighter pilot while Ronsel becomes a tank commander. Rees and cowriter Virgil Williams (adapting a novel by Hillary Jordan) alternate between these characters’ wartime exploits as well as the plights of the characters back in Mississippi, observing parallels between all of their experiences. Life is almost as hard on the farm as it is in battle—with most grown men in town serving in the war, the remaining farmers have more work to do. At one point, the Jackson patriarch, Hap (Rob Morgan), breaks his leg and is bedridden for months; Rees shows his wife and children working the fields, trying their best to make up for Hap’s absence. If they don’t cultivate the fields in time, they may not produce a crop, which means greater debt for the family and possible starvation—life on the farm seems as much a life-or-death struggle as war.
