Following up last year's Emmy Award-winning HBO Bessie Smith biopic Bessie, director Dee Rees is now turning her attention to adapting Hillary Jordan's 2008 novel Mudbound. And she's pulling together a decent ensemble cast, with Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell and Jason Clarke all set to step in front of her cameras.
Novel and film are set in rural Mississippi just after WWII. City folk Henry and Laura McAllan start a new life on a cotton farm in 1946, where Laura feels far from at home, struggling to raise two young children in an isolated shack under the eye of her racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud.
As the war comes to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not and is sensitive to Laura's plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, meanwhile, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the farm, comes home from war a hero, only to face far more dangerous battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. These two unlikely friends become players in a tragedy.
Mulligan is obviously Laura then, with Hedlund and Clarke the McAllan brothers (division of labour TBC), and Mitchell playing Ronsel.
Criminal Minds' Virgil Williams wrote the original screenplay, which has since been overhauled by Rees. There's no start date yet, pending the "package" finding some distribution deals.
Jordan's novel is published in the UK by Windmill.