I saw this movie when it first aired on television around 10 years ago. Both my husband and I were drawn to it especially because we were in interracial married couple living in the south. We didn't expect it to be so personal and topical.This movie explores love between soul mates and demonstrates that this kind of strong attraction is not so much about the outside but the deep psychic bonds that can occur between people. Timothy Hutton plays one of his best roles as the lover committed to his love. Both of them are put under extreme social pressures that only the bond between soul mates can survive.This isn't a gushy romance movie in the tacky sense. It's a love story played out against the challenges of the political and social times that never lets you forget that hearts are involved. You'll wish you had been so lucky to experience love at this level.I was.

This is an incredibly touching film about a true-life couple, Mr. and Mrs. Loving. Mr. Loving was white and his wife was black. In the 50s and 60s, this was NOT accepted by many Americans and was actually illegal in some states! The couple found this out to their surprise when they could not find hotel lodgings together, were ostracized by many and were ultimately arrested for marrying. Today, in the 21st Century, it is hard to imagine this was true only a few decades ago in America, but it was. Their fight, all the way to the Supreme Court, is dramatized in the film. The acting and writing were excellent and I have no complaints about the film. I strongly recommend it to teens, as so often they forget how far we have come as a nation.UPDATE: HBO recently made a documentary about this called "A Loving Story". While also worth seeing, the 1996 movie is better--mostly because it is, at times, hard to understand the documentary (due to poor sound) and captions were really needed.

This was a really good interracial love story that did not exaggerate stereotypes. The characters were actually good looking (hear that Whoopie Goldberg!!, and believable. The love story between Timothy Hutton and Lela Rochon comes across as two people who have fallen in love and its up to the rest of the world to get it. I did not like the scenes when they moved to the city and race started to interfere with their lives, but the movie is based on a true story and that was the only sad part. I like the fact that when Lela Rochon's character gets pregnant, there is no drama and Timothy Hutton's character thinks nothing about marrying her. If your a Gen X'r who grew up in a multi-cultured environment, try and get this movie for your collection. It really is a beautiful love story.

People have taken to saying that "only since 1967 has marriage been legal between blacks and whites" in the United States. That is not true. Only a minority of states, such as Virginia, still banned such marriages in 1967, and it was such prohibitions that the court was asked to strike down in the case that inspired this movie. Blacks and whites had been legally marrying elsewhere in America since colonial times. So the Supreme Court was not being asked to "create" interracial marriage in the Loving case.I've known about the Loving case since I was a child, and I had some doubts about whether I wanted to see a movie about it. For the most part, I think this was a good effort, though far from an excellent one. Doing movies about living people is tricky. In this movie, we are shown naturalistic details that I could have done without; but holes also were left in the narrative that I'm sure would not have been there, paradoxically, if we hadn't been dealing with a true story. Many people could have missed that Richard and Mildred had known each other since childhood, an important detail that's barely mentioned. That country bar or club in the first scene that shows blacks and whites socializing together is never commented upon or explained. Yes, such a place (if run by blacks) could have existed in a time of Jim Crow and when "miscegenation" was a crime in Virginia, but its existence is a paradox, and one that's never explained and would go completely over the heads of most of the people watching. We meet people who are never identified or only identified much later, and not while they're on camera. Richard's family's reaction to his decision to marry Mildred is never dealt with at all. We see his parents only briefly, and they are all but mute. It would have been better to leave them out altogether and have viewers assume Richard was an orphan than to duck this major issue in this way. Most important, I wish we had been given some idea of what kind of man Richard is (for the story really is his) before being plunged into the love story. What motivates him? Why does he choose to marry Mildred instead of merely "keeping" her, an arrangement that his society would have accepted? We never get to know Richard, so these questions are never answered. Still, I would otherwise give high marks to Timothy Hutton's portrayal of Richard. He comes across as a very ordinary man, as no hero--and that's important. The story of Richard Loving is that of an ordinary man, a common man, and therein lies its majesty.