Starring Joel Edgerton. Rated PG

There’s understatement, and then there’s Loving, a film that tells its real-life story of 1950s interracial marriage with a tone as stubbornly restrained as its subjects.

Jeff Nichols’s film takes all its cues from the central couple, rural Virginians Richard and Mildred Loving (Aussie Joel Edgerton and Ethiopian discovery Ruth Negga). In the opening scene, she whispers over the hum of crickets that she’s pregnant, his man of few words pronounces that “real good”, and before you know it they are zooming off to nearby Washington, D.C., in their Ford Fairlane to get hitched. Richard tells her there’ll be “less red tape there”, but, in a sign of how reticent the film is to oversell the drama, it’ll be quite a while till we find out what they’re really up against when they return home: the rigid antimiscegenation laws of Virginia.

In most civil-rights movies, you get grandiose courtroom scenes mixed in with a lot of speeches, a lot of fighting, and a lot of hollering. What Nichols is interested in here is how the day-to-day racism of the U.S. could slowly suffocate a normal, working-class family. Richard is a bricklayer who just wants to fiddle with his car in the yard, and Edgerton endows him with a remarkable, near-wordless sensitivity, with huge slumping shoulders that become more weighed down as his troubles worsen. His love for Mildred just is; unromanticized, it feels natural and simple from that forthright opening scene—as it has to.

In their farming community, blacks and whites grow up together; as a cop later tells him, “All you over there are mixed up.” And these early, idyllic scenes are portrayed with vivid period details by Nichols, including clapboard houses where strings of laundry sway over the weathered porches. Any racism here is played subtly: it’s clear someone has ratted out Richard and Mildred, but they, and we, will never know who, and that helps feed his quiet paranoia.

The arc here is not extreme. The couple is forced to move to a city in a more liberal state and they miss their farm life. They don’t come from a world where they would know how to stand up for themselves. Early on, Richard valiantly promises, “I’ll get a lawyer,” but you can tell he doesn’t really even know where to start. Eventually, civil-rights attorneys see a chance to use the Lovings to change laws in the Supreme Court. In the most telling proof of the couple’s humbleness, they don’t attend that big court date.

So Loving stands as a fitting honour to its modest heroes. But, especially in the last quarter, that understatement poses a problem for the film: where there should be slow-burn tension building to a moving finale, the story feels like it’s plodding. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” Martin Luther King once said, and Nichols seems to be interested in that slow bend—an arc we need to be reminded of right now. But we need to stoke a little passion about the issue now, too.