Jul 02, 2016 12:14 PM
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Gary Ross’s “Free State of Jones” is inspired from one of the most inspiring stories of Civil War. This flick depicts the rebellious war led against Confederacy by an angry farmer named Newton Knight with his army of ragtag whites and runaway slaves, who declared a portion of south-eastern Mississippi, including Jones county, loyal and independent to Union.
No one said that recreating historical episodes were easy, though this inherently astonishing and powerful as this less-known episode is, Ross fails to deliver the strength of the movie due to his ill-conceived script. the lead performance by Matthew McConaughey is brilliant, making me thing that this performance and skill was wasted under this title.
The movie starts right off with the reminders of the horror of the only war fought on American soil. On a battlefield with disciplined Confederate soldiers facing the enemies and encountering blistering bullets that stuck in one of the soldiers. An orderly who takes the wounded to a field hospital, Knight(McConaughey), who is medical nurse, is already disgusted by the suffering he sees, as well as being angered by a new law that exempts first born from military service if he has 20 slaves, and if 40 slaves, even the second son is exempted(downright ridiculous law). As one of his disaffected fellow soldiers says, it’s “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.”
When a teenage kinsman shows up to fight and is soon killed, Knight deserts from his company to take the boy’s body home, to give him a proper burial and so putting himself at risk for capture and execution. On home ground, he’s among people who’ve been victimized by the Confederacy’s “tax in kind” law. He finds his wife Serena(Keri Russell) tending their son who is terribly ill and no doctor is available. A female slave from a nearby plantation named Rachel(Gugu Mbatha-Raw) applies herbal remedies that soon shows effects and keeps the fever under notch.
Eventually, unable to hide at home, Knight escapes into the swamp, where he joins a small group of runaway slaves in an enclave which is impenetrable and not long before these fugitives are joined by others, both black and white. Though the movie shows racism as a makeshift community, but the group’s desperate circumstances obviously dictate a modicum of solidarity.
The real action just begins after hour of screenplay when the Confederate command becomes alarmed by Knight’s renegade and sends soldiers to deal with them. But Knight and company have gathered their own set of arsenal and are ready to battle out. They fight and win. And the streak continues even when they stage a surprise attack on the Confederate forces at a funeral, where Knight pursues and kills the rebel commander(brilliantly played by Thomas Francis Murphy).
From there, Knight’s men manage to take over all or part of several counties and, after fending off the substantial Confederate forces sent to subdue them, declare a “Free State of Jones” under the stars and stripes.
That would make a good ending of the story, but it’s not what happens here. If the film’s first hour is needlessly slow and protracted, its last half-hour proves to be an unfocused patchwork of scenes that seem designed to prove only that Reconstruction was an even bigger drag than war. First, rebels like the local plantation owner pledge allegiance to the union, have their citizenship restored, and quickly move to deliver freed blacks into new forms of servitude, even as the Ku Klux Klan arises to keep them from voting. Newton joins his black comrades in resisting these moves, and meanwhile defies local mores by living with wife Serena and common-law wife Rachel, who both bear several children each for him.(Though the film doesn’t show it, the Knights’ unconventional lifestyle made them outcasts to both blacks and white).
There’s worthwhile history here, to be sure, but some of it’s tedious while other parts are dubious. The film’s story feels like it just peters out, without reaching any discernible dramatic or thematic point. Leaves kind of on high note and then rushes through the end to reach a closure.
Another flaw in Ross’ screenplay is a subplot set during the Jim Crow era, several decades after the Civil War, when one of Knight’s male descendants is on trial for violating Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation laws by marrying a white woman(the prosecution charges he was descended from Rachel, which gives him enough black blood to qualify as black under the law). Though perhaps an interesting footnote to the main story, this digressive thread feels entirely unnecessary and dispensable.
It his screenwriting that is problematic in ways large and small, Ross is on much more solid ground and succeeds to achieve very fine work from his cast. Long-haired and bearded, McConaughey makes Knight a man full of righteous fire, but also thoughtful and as restrained as circumstances allow. Russell gives Serena a flinty edge, while Mbatha-Raw imbues Rachel with both dignity and quiet resilience. Other stand-out performances come from Bill Tangradi as Confederate baddie Lt. Barbour and Mahershala Ali as Moses Washington, a former slave who becomes a political activist after the war.
Talk about knowing more on the racism and few ill-thought laws that were written during 18th century, only to make lives more convenient for rich and confusing for poor. The movie plays out everything with dignity but fails to deliver the essence of that historic episode.
It can be better to dodge this as your weekend goal for movies.
