A Movie You Might Have Missed #66 : Loving

It's been 11 years since I began this series highlighting movies I wished more people knew about. I'm rerunning it from the beginning because I still think these are movies you might have missed.

They didn't want to change the world.

They just wanted to live their lives.

Loving tells the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), an interracial couple who married and then spent the next nine years fighting for the right to live as a family in their home state of Virginia. Their civil rights case, Loving v. Virginia, went to the Supreme Court, whose 1967 decision in their favor changed marriage in the United States forever.

This is a deep, rich telling of a wonderful story without feeling the need to embellish the facts. It is a bit slow, as many reviewers mentioned, and the director knows how to use silence and long shots, so you have to settle in for the long view.

However, as my husband said, by the end you've been given a picture of their devotion and marriage, not just the court case (which is honestly certainly not center stage). And you know just what winning that court case means in the real lives of real people.