Free State Of Jones

Synopsis: A Confederate army deserter, Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), returns to Mississippi and leads a militia of fellow deserters, runaway slaves and women in an uprising against the corrupt local Confederate government.

Gary Ross’s film opens with a confronting sequence in which Union and Confederate soldiers engage in a bloody battle.  War-weary rank-and-file Confederate foot soldiers are brutally cut down by Union bullets while at their base camp army surgeons perform rough-and-ready amputations of shattered limbs.  It is scene which recalls the careful historical research of Ken Burns’ pioneering Civil War documentary series from 1990 and is symptomatic of an approach which by and large is carried through the film.

Free State of Jones is a fascinating story based on real events during and immediately after the Civil War which tells the story of poor white Southern farmers who rebelled against the wealthy slave-owning land-owners who purported to fight the North on the principle of self-determination  but as Newton Knight, a farmer from Jones County, Mississippi came to realize, in reality to defend their property and privileged social position.

The story of Knight’s radicalization and righteous campaign against the Confederacy during the war is the strongest part of the film even if it does move rather slowly. The post-war period, known as The Reconstruction, during which some Southern states tried to covertly re-instate slavery and the Ku Klux Klan came into being is more superficially dealt with and presents some problems in pacing as the war’s end cannot help but feel like the natural closing point for the narrative. Ross, however, wants to tell the whole story, even including scenes which surface intermittently throughout the main narrative, which are set in the 1940s when one of Knight’s descendants who is one-eighth Negro, is convicted of breaking Mississippi’s segregation laws by marrying a white woman.

McConaughey, always an intense performer, with his under-nourished figure, hollowed eyes and scraggy beard is marvellous in his role. Thanks to Ross’s well-judged handling Knight is a believably decent, ordinary man of the land who is awakened by injustice and eventually becomes possessed by his moral fervour, even dangerously so. While the whole film largely avoids the conventional dramatics of mainstream American cinema at times it comes close to them and Ross, who was also the screenwriter, struggles to balance the focus on Knight with the role of black people who are actually the real reason for what is happening.  He does this by foregrounding two slaves, Moses (Mahershala Ali), a runaway who becomes Knight’s friend and Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a “house” slave with whom Knight would eventually have the above-mentioned child. But given the overwhelming attention given to Knight there simply isn’t enough room to develop both these characters who remain rather generic.  

With an intriguing, hitherto untold story realized with well-crafted production values and featuring a compelling performance by Matthew McConaughey. Free State of Jones is film for serious-minded audiences who will appreciate its serious-minded purpose.

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