Loving

Even if all you ever want from a film is moral affirmation and a basketful of the warm-fuzzies, writer-director Jeff Nichols’ mildewed biopic Loving is still a fusty and unengrossing watch. Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga star as Richard and Mildred Loving, a real-life Virginia interracial couple who married in D.C., but were arrested at home and forced to leave the state in 1958. The ACLU picked up their case in the 1960s, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court in a landmark case that effectively eliminated anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. Nichols works hard to make Richard and Mildred as banal and devoid of personality as possible, but for all of the film’s drowsy respectfulness, the script is still loaded with clunker lines. (“Is there anything you’d like me to say to them … and by them, I mean the Supreme Court justices of the United States?”) D.B.