A fine movie about a sorrowful place and time in American history

The 2017 Netflix original film, Mudbound (Dee Rees, dir.) has its flaws but overall it's a dramatic and engaging film that takes an unflinching look at a sorrowful and shameful timeand place in American history. The film is about rural life on farms in central Mississippi in the 1940s; we see a small black community, deprived of land ownership through some sort of chicanery regarding deeds of property, living not even as sharecroppers but as tenant farmers, completely depending on the good will of the while landowners, themselves struggling to eke a living out of the land. The white family we focus on thinks of themselves as benevolent partners w/the black families, but in fact they are at best indifferent and often cruel and unfeeling. Two characters, one black one white, go off to war and come home changed in different ways: the black man for once has been treated as an equal and even a hero, and he resists the racist segregation when he returns to Miss., with obvious consequences; the white man comes back and can relate to nobody who has not experienced the war, so forms a friendship w/ the black soldier, also w/ obvious consequences. The acting is fine, and the soundtrack is really good, w/ some great gospel moments. The film is based on a novel and suffers from hat, especially in the first half: way too much jumping around among the various families and plot lines, and far too much info conveyed through lengthy voice-over narratives. I also wish the movie had more nuance - you could almost say that the movie is too "black and white," with all the black characters noble in suffering and all (but one, maybe 2) of the white characters narrow-minded and bigoted. That said. the film has a strong impact, and it's important to keep in mind the painful moments in American history, especially for those who subscribe to American exceptionalism.