"Tell them I love my wife"

An interesting movie, I bet.

Loving Is History at its Best

It’s very late in Loving that Joel Edgerton’s Oscar-worthy moment happens. 

His character, Richard Loving, is standing on a porch with his lawyer Bernard Cohen (played by Nick Kroll); they’re looking out over the farm where he’s been hiding with his wife Mildred for years. She is black and of Native descent, and he is white. 

They live in 1960s Virginia, where there is an anti-miscegenation law. 

Cohen asks him if there’s anything he’d like the Supreme Court to know, as they decide the historic case that will forever bear Richard Perry Loving’s name. 

Edgerton gives him a beady, pained look before replying, “Tell them I love my wife.”

. . . .

But its cast, if not exactly unknown, isn’t the usual Nicole-Kidman-and-Tom-Hanks A-list medley either. There is Edgerton, whose looks are not movie-star handsome. 

He seems pretty intent to leaving Richard’s rough edges unsmoothed, in a way that a slicker actor never could have. 

Ruth Negga, the British actress who plays Mildred Loving, similarly has to do most of her emoting by way of downcast looks and a few simple lines. 

Edgerton is likely to get more attention, though it is Negga’s incredible performance that makes the film so powerfully subtle. 

And her role is the more important one: It was Mildred who found the couple’s ACLU lawyers by way of a letter to Bobby Kennedy. 

Being more comfortable with the press, she became the couple’s public voice too, if a hesitant one. 

“I feel hopeful,” is all that Negga’s version tells a full press compliment outside a courthouse, even as Virginia courts rule against the couple.