Movie Review—Free State of Jones

Free State of Jones

by Peter J. O'Connell

Free State of Jones. Released: June 2016. Runtime: 139 mins. MPAA rating: R for brutal battle scenes and disturbing graphic images.

The history of the American Civil War is a treasure trove of true stories—of tragedy, of horror, of glory and inspiration, of farce. It could hardly be otherwise for a conflict that tore apart a nation, freed a race, created battlefields from New Mexico to Pennsylvania and Florida to Kansas, and left—according to the latest historical estimates—750,000 dead, the equivalent of 7 million today.   

                               

Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross, is a film of one of those fascinating true—but little-known—stories, that of a Mississippi area that seceded from the state and, blacks and whites, together, battled the Confederacy. The story begins with vivid, even shocking, scenes of a battle in 1862. During the battle, a frightened youth (Jacob Lofland), just drafted, is killed. Another soldier, Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), takes the youth's body back for burial in their home county of Jones, where Knight's small farm is located. 

Once home Knight decides to stay there. He is disgusted by the fact that holders of 20 or more slaves are exempt from the draft and that Confederate troops regularly commandeer much food and other supplies from the poor farmers of the area. Deciding that the conflict is “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight,” Knight takes refuge in a swamp, not far from where his wife, Serena (Keri Russell), maintains their farm. 

Soon other war resisters start joining Knight in the swamp, as do fugitive slaves, including Moses (Mahershala Ali), a man of great courage. A community of equals springs up there. As Knight says: “Everybody is somebody's n......” After a time Knight establishes a relationship with a black woman, Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and conducts his life thereafter as if with two wives, one white and one black.

The Confederate cavalry that patrols the area cannot penetrate the swamp but continues depredations against the small farms. Knight, aided by Moses, organizes effective resistance in the form of a fighting force that encompasses young and old, blacks and whites, men and women. These guerrillas are even able to kill the Confederate commander (Wayne Pere). Eventually, the “Free State of Jones” is proclaimed as independent of the State of Mississippi. Two other counties join Jones in the revolt. 

The movie does not end in 1865 when the war does but becomes one of the few films to deal with the Reconstruction era that followed, and is virtually the only film ever to treat that era as other than one in which a “poor, suffering South” was oppressed by a brutal military, exploitative carpetbaggers and violent blacks (a la the viciously racist Birth of a Nation of 1915 or the “sentimentally racist” Gone With the Wind of 1939). 

Instead, with historical accuracy, Free State shows the hope with which blacks greeted emancipation, attending schools, etc. These hopes are soon dashed as hypocritical plantation owners and Confederate politicians and officers take an oath to “defend the Constitution” but then reinstitute virtual slavery under other names. This comeback of the Confederates, backed up by the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and other night riders, is countered by the imposition of federal military rule, but those troops eventually are withdrawn in political deals, and blacks are plunged into the century-long hell of sharecropping and segregation.

Through all this Newton Knight and his family continue their struggles for justice. The film even incorporates some scenes set in the 1940s that show a struggle by a descendant of Knight and Rachel, a very white-looking man (Brian Lee Franklin), who has married a white woman, but finds himself on trial for violating Mississippi's anti-miscegenation laws.

Free State of Jones is admirable in its scope and its highlighting of localistic and class issues in the Civil War and Reconstruction rather than just sectional and racial ones. The performances are almost uniformly solid, in some cases quite good. However, this lengthy film is rather diffuse in focus, choppy in editing, and—despite the striking events involved—somewhat slow in pace. It's almost as if the makers were so concerned to show us a lot of “important stuff” that they didn't devote sufficient time to organizing the material in other than a kind of historical pageant way. So see the film and give it two cheers but save one in the hope that some future version of the Free State of Jones story will give the history involved the full dramatic impact that it deserves. 

“Footnotes” to the film: The Free State of Jones was not the only area that seceded from the Confederacy. Western Virginia, of course, did and became the State of West Virginia. Small areas in Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee also followed the path of Jones. (2) Some have directed criticism at Free State of Jones for being in the “white savior of blacks” tradition. The criticism seems rather misplaced, however, in view of the fact that the actual historical figure who led the Jones revolt was a white man (a white Knight!) and “married” to a black woman. Later this year, The Birth of a Nation, directed by Nate Parker, will be released. It deals with a black revolt that was not aided by whites. And it consciously uses the title of D.W. Griffith's classic, but racist, film in an attempt to transvalue that title. (3) Also later this year, Loving, a film about the 1960s legal case that overturned anti-miscegenation laws, will be released.