Film draws parallels between past, present

FREE STATE OF JONES

FREE STATE OF JONES

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Director: Gary Ross

Actors: Matthew McConaughey, Mahershala Ali

Rating:3.5 stars

For his first film since the futuristic fantasy The Hunger Games (2012), writer-director Gary Ross turns to the past to narrate the true story of an insurgency during the US Civil War of the 19th century.

An impoverished Mississippi farmer and former Confederate soldier (McConaughey, impassioned) leads an armed uprising against his former comrades.

Disenchanted with the savage ry of the ongoing conflict, he deserts his post. Rallying struggling White farmers and runaway slaves to his cause, they declare war on Southern soldiers and prosperous cotton plantation owners.

For a brief period, the ragtag biracial community even succeeds in creating their own separate state, independent of both the Union and the Confederacy.

Despite the fractious relationship with his first wife (Keri Russell) and remarriage to a former house slave (British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw), he remains ‘loyal’ to both women, who cohabit peacefully.

Director Ross spends too much time (at 140 minutes, the film is unduly lengthy) in establishing subsidiary characters such as a villainous colonel (Thomas Francis Murphy) and an escaped Black freedom fighter (Ali).

The production design evokes the Civil War era of the old South in painstaking detail. But while the battle sequences are appropriately chaotic, they generally fail to translate as exciting drama. Benoit Delhomme’s striking cinematography and Lucinda Williams’s rendition of the dirge, ’I’m crying’ over the end credits, are highlights.

As if to highlight how injustice for some leads to injustice for all, the narrative frequently fast-forwards 85 years to a miscegenation trial involving the hero’s great-grandson. Evidently, racial prejudice and social oppression are still a scourge in modern times.

All in all, this little-known chapter of a turbulent epoch in American history is definitely worth a watch.