Ruth Negga as Mildred Loving (Loving, 2016)
Negga’s physical contributions, which prize restraint above all else, are at once the most distinctive of her category and the ones easiest to underrate. [...] Even in what are easily Mildred’s most private and solitary moments, in which the character receives two separate pieces of pivotal news by phone, Negga formidably maintains her delicate reserve. Nichols honors this decision, training his camera on her face as conflicted responses ripple ever so gently across it. To the naked eye, it might seem like Negga is doing next to nothing in each of these scenes. But look closer at the concentration covering Negga’s face — her gaze rooted to the spot, cheeks flushing — and you can detect the existence of deep inner thought, the process or complexities of which are never spelled out, purposely so. Negga leaves a palpable space between Mildred’s journey and the viewer’s experience of this journey, preserving an elusive air in a genre that hardly has time for individual mystery, much less subtlety of such skillful and deliberate variety. In doing this, Negga lends her scenes a unique and disquieting tension that Loving itself could occasionally use more of. But much more crucially, she enlists the viewer to actually fill in these self-imposed psychological gaps between audience and actress. Negga withholds just enough in her reaction shots and centerpiece close-ups to secure our involvement, leaving it up to us to decipher what Mildred might be thinking, while respecting her privacy enough to not draw us entirely into her mindset. —Matthew Eng