Movie Review: "Free State Of Jones"

"Free State Of Jones": B.  Free Sate Of Jones is a film that bites off a little more than it can chew, but eventually overcomes an odd structure and questionable editing to deliver an entertaining, educational Civil War story.  The movie opens with an 1862 battle scene reminiscent of the D-Day landing depicted in 1998's Saving Private Ryan.  Confederate soldiers, making no attempt to defend themselves, are easy targets for the Union soldiers as the gray-jacketed infantrymen march over the rise.  Director Gary Ross zooms in for the gory bloodletting.  Battlefield nurse Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), dressed in a plain white long-sleeve shirt and therefore distinguishable from the combatants, drags the mortally wounded southerners on a makeshift stretcher to nearby hospital tents.  Aware of the fact that the medical personnel's triage protocol is not based on the severity of injury but rather on the military rank of the patient, Newt drapes a perished officer's jacket over the barely breathing body on the stretcher before bringing him into the tent.  The ruse works; the man is immediately tended to.  Newt is a wily one, a fact which will be confirmed, time and again.

Although born and raised in Mississippi, Newt does not see the War Between The States as his war.  Rather, it is a war fought by the poor Dixie uneducated low class for the benefit of the land owners, particularly those who depend on slave labor to run their cotton operations.  He has no sense of defending the South's honor when the people he despises most are not the northerners but the powerful entitled gentry right in his own locale, Jones County.  When a teenage neighbor is conscripted into action by a Rebel officer and within minutes dies in Newt's arms, Newt's decision to desert is confirmed.  He is now a man without a country, a rebel (small "r") with an impossible cause.

 

After a brief visit to his Mississippi farm and family, fugitive Newt makes his way to a hideout near a swamp where most of the other temporary residents are runaway slaves.  Later they're joined by other deserters like himself.  The relationship between Newt and his new friends is mutually beneficial, teaching each other tricks of survival.  The group is mostly self-sufficient, although periodically supplies are brought to the hideout by Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a trusted slave who seems to be able to bamboozle whoever her master is into thinking she's doing something other than visiting the swamp.  With every visit, Rachel and Newt get more snuggly, but the blacks in the camp don't seem to mind her taking up with a white man.  As a matter of fact, neither does Newt's white farm wife, Serena (Keri Russell).  This romantic arrangement may or may not have been illegal in the Utah Territory, but most certainly was in Mississippi.  It's an issue which director Ross glosses over.

 

As the number of castaways and fugitives increases, Newt assumes a leadership position, with Moses (Mahershala Ali), a slave, as his right hand man.  In an ironic action, the group declares they have seceded from Mississippi, which of course has already seceded from the US.  This new entity, the Free State Of Jones, takes on the Confederate army, and as a result becomes strange bedfellows with the Yanks.  Guns and ammo never seem to be in short supply for Newt, Moses and the boys.  They have valuable connections with armament dealers.  The Rebs know where Newt's swamp foxes are hiding out, but their officers recognize the folly of initiating battle against the Free State on the latter's home turf, i.e., the swamp.  It is a home field advantage which surely would result in lethal ambush.

 

The Civil War ended in 1865, two years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.  The movie continues through the subsequent post-war Reconstruction.  Carpetbaggers descend from the north, joined by their southern brethren, the Scalawags.  The plight of the newly freed blacks does not improve much, if at all.  They may be free, but they remain poor, uneducated and still at the mercy of the whites in many ways.  The Ku Klux Klan runs unchecked, inflicting lawlessness targeted at blacks and their churches.  Newt is steadfast by his friends' side through the many hard times, as much a mentor and leader as a warrior.

 

About a quarter of the way through the movie, the story suddenly flash-forwards eighty-five years to a 1940's Mississippi courtroom in which a descendant of Newt is being tried for the state crime of interracial marriage to a white woman.  The heritage of the defendant hinges on whether he is part of the family tree that Newt produced with Serena or the family tree from the Newt-Rachel affair.  Every so often director Ross revisits and updates the trial.  I found these interruptions to be extraneous distractions which only tack on more minutes to a film which could stand to clip a few.

 

McConaughey turns in an excellent performance.  I was never a fan until I saw him in the movie Mud (reviewed here on June 20, 2013; B+).  I later (in my Movie Ratings Recap of February 8, 2014) rated it the third best movie I attended in 2013.  His characters in Mud and Free State display many similarities which play to the actor's strengths.  Both those men, Newt and Mud, are outsiders, rough and ragged around the edges, but characters you pull for while they are on the run.  McConaughey has come a long way since his performance in 2009's Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, to which I gave a pre-blog rating of D-.  In fact, the following is an excerpt from an e-mailed review I sent to my three kids on May 19, 2009:  "Matthew McConaughey may be the only Hollywood film star who would lose to Keanu Reeves in an acting contest."  Yep, MM has come a long way.  I wonder if there's hope for Reeves.