“Free State of Jones,” directed and written by Gary Ross (“The Hunger Games,” “Seabiscuit”), is pretty typical Hollywood History. Although based on the true story of a Mississippi community who “seceded” from the Confederacy in the middle of the Civil War, much of the truth of “Free State of Jones” gets muddled in a narrative told mainly through the point of view of one man: Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a deserter of the Confederate Army, the ostensible leader of the Jones Army and an apparent early proponent of interracial marriage and equal rights for former slaves.
If you can’t tell already, this movie really makes no effort to hide the fact that this is a White Savior story with a healthy inducement of White Guilt on the side. For that reason, what could have been a truly fascinating movie based on an episode from the Civil War that few people outside of historians know about is instead somewhat boring and, by the end, needlessly exhausting.
A small farmer from Jones County, Mississippi, Newton is a reluctant Confederate who reiterates time and again that he doesn’t want to die to protect the rich Southerners' cotton. He deserts after his teenage kinsman is shot in his first battle, then becomes a fugitive once he helps one of his neighbors defend her farm against the Confederacy’s tax agents. After being pursued by a slave patrol, Newt takes refuge in the swamp with a small group of runaway slaves that, by the next year, has also become a refuge for deserters.
He becomes close to a black runaway named Moses (Mahershala Ali) and Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a house slave from a nearby plantation who smuggles food and supplies to the growing community. After a few clashes with the Confederate Army, Newt ends up leading a rebellion within a rebellion to protect the local farmers and reclaims three Mississippi counties first for the Union, and then, when no help from the Union arrives to fight off the coming Confederate Army, the Free State of Jones.
The film lasts roughly from 1862 to 1876, through the worst of the war and the worst of Reconstruction. Within the major events of the movie, Newt’s first wife abandons him, and Newt falls in love, and subsequently has a child, with Rachel. While this progression is presented without drama, they become significant in relation to the film’s bizarre framing device, which is a miscegenation trial set in the 1940s. Also part of the true story, Newt and Rachel’s white-passing descendant is accused of the dreadful crime of marrying a white woman while having one drop of black blood.
I’m not going to say much about this except that every scene of the trial is incredibly jarring, and it never feels like it should be part of the same movie as the rest of the narrative. This isn’t a movie about interracial relationships and the battle against the laws that prevented them, like Jeff Nichols' upcoming “Loving,” but it includes that aspect of post-Civil War racism because this movie also includes every aspect of antebellum and post-Civil War racism.
And that’s really where it gets exhausting. If you need a laundry list of everything slaves and freed African-Americans suffered before, during and after the Civil War, you can find it in this movie. Selling Moses’s wife and son off to Texas, prompting him to run away from his master not once but three times? Check. The repeated rape of Rachel by her master, and her beating when she finally refuses him (thankfully never shown on screen)? Check. The slavery-in-all-but-name that occurred during the early years of Reconstruction, when plantation owners could kidnap their former slaves’ children, call them “apprentices,” and force them to work unpaid until they came of age? Check. The emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and their brutal hanging of a black leader for registering his fellow black men to vote? Check and check. These episodes are historically true, but with this movie in particular, they all feel exploitative and hollow because each one of these instances is portrayed through the eyes of the central white man.
I think Ross must have thought he could get away with this because he also establishes Newt’s situation as something equivalent to that of the runaway slaves from the moment Newt is introduced. He goes from fighting a rich man’s war to being chased by a slave patrol and bitten by one of their hounds so deeply that Moses later remarks, “You must taste like us, it latched on so tight.” After a Confederate colonel hangs two young boys attempting to surrender, Newt makes a long speech at their funeral that summarizes the core tenet of the movie and Newt’s beliefs: That every man, black or white, is a slave, so long as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In that way, Ross turns Newt into a Civil War Robin Hood, complete with integrated Merry Men. Unfortunately, Ross also turns a cultural conflict that was always about race into one that is more about class, doing a major disservice to history and, I imagine, to the real story of the Free State of Jones.
Full disclaimer: I have two history degrees, but I love watching Hollywood tackle history because of the way movies simplify historical narratives into whatever is most emotionally resonant about that particular story. “Free State of Jones” does that, but not in a way that’s satisfying like arguably lesser-made films like “Glory” (1989) or “The Patriot” (2000). And as a historian, I did appreciate the funeral ambush scene in “Jones” where grieving mothers and runaway slaves take up arms against a Confederate division and totally annihilate them. I’ll have to read one of the books on Jones County to see if that’s historically accurate, but whether in film or in scholarship, you almost never see the inclusion of women and minorities in such an explicit way. Despite the rest of the movie’s flaws, it is refreshing to see it here.
All in all, I wish this film had focused more on its female and African-American characters than Newton Knight, but I get why it didn’t. Hollywood consistently uses a white male protagonist to get these stories from script to screen, but that excuse is falling more and more short with every passing year. “Free State of Jones” feels especially silly ahead of “The Birth of a Nation,” Nate Parker's movie about Nat Turner’s rebellion that deliberately reclaims the title of one of the most celebrated and racist movies ever made, coming out later this year. That is a movie I’m looking forward to seeing; “Free State of Jones” is an episode of Hollywood History best left forgotten.