The first
thing that needs saying about Free State
of Jones is that, as history, it’s hooey that very nearly makes Braveheart
look watertight. In reality, its hero Newton Knight was a slave-owner and
bigamist whose motives were far less clear-cut than those presented here. In
the race to follow Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, Hollywood has snatched up
another striking Civil War tale and hurriedly repurposed it into a format the
industry (and perhaps the audience) better understands: the old-timey star
vehicle centred on a Caucasian saviour figure – a literal white Knight.
This Newt
(Matthew McConaughey) is a beardily humble Confederate medic who deserts his
post in late 1862 in order to bury a nephew shot on the battlefield in their
native Jones County, Mississippi. Once there, he establishes himself as a
protector and educator of those women, children and slaves being preyed upon by
Government tax collectors. There follow plentiful, sporadically involving Robin
Hood adventures in which Newt trains the locals up to guard their corn, the
powers-that-be seize said corn, only for our merry band of outlaws to take the
corn back at gunpoint.
Just as we’re
settling into this altogether simplistic reading of history, a jolting “85
years later” card yanks us into a Harper Lee-like courtroom drama involving one
of Knight’s descendants, accused of breaching segregation laws. You might see
this great leap forwards as a sign of ambition on co-writer/director Gary
Ross’s part, a desire to tell The Whole American Story while underlining how
little has changed in the way the state treats its citizens. Yet it also smacks
of behind-the-scenes panic: that the filmmakers sensed having Matt McConaughey
running about a forest bears scant relation to contemporary race-relations.
Either way,
it’s typical of a film that at every juncture strains to give us more than
McQueen’s film did: more drama, more extras, more production design, more
bodies hanging from trees, and many more ways to lionise its protagonist,
including a most convivial mid-film hog roast. (More catering!) There are
points when Free State of Jones stands still and allows us to feel those trace
elements of history in its bones, the past running along its spine: a few
scenes between McConaughey and escaped slave Mahershala Ali, the implied
attempts of housegirl Gugu Mbatha-Raw to keep her master at arm’s length.
Yet as
multiplex-bound awards bait, stillness and seriousness just aren’t in this
film’s blood: Ross would rather contrive a mock-funeral ambush – pure spaghetti
Western, complete with war widows leaping out of coffins to gun down their
adversaries – where McQueen mournfully knew he had more than enough of our own
dubious heritage to work and confront us with. Given this restlessness, the
general sense of a film pulling in several directions simultaneously, it’s
perhaps no wonder it can’t ever seem to get its own story quite right.
Ross
presumably pitched Free State of Jones as another well-intentioned history
lesson, inviting us to cheer this chiselled white dude as he came to look out
for all those around him. On screen, though, you could be forgiven for seeing
in Knight the origins of all those militia movement who’ve retreated to the
wilds to take up arms against the State. Possibly a few bets were hedged in an
attempt to appeal to bleeding hearts and the American heartlands alike, but the
final product demands we turn a blind eye to its rampant gun fetishism. (More
collateral damage!)
It wouldn’t
be too hard to envision a version of this story with a younger Clint Eastwood
or Mel Gibson in the lead role, and in both cases it would almost certainly
have turned out more forceful than the tepid, overlong compromise we’ve ended
up with. There is a danger with imposing the values of 2016 on the 1860s, and
seeing the heroism we want to see there: this messy episode winds up saying far
less about the past than it does about our present moment, one when it’s often
unclear whether society’s coming good, or simply going to hell in a handcart.
Free State of Jones is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray through StudioCanal.
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