Free State of Jones dramatizes the remarkable story of Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a poor Mississippi farmer who led a counter-rebellion against the Confederacy during the Civil War. An Army medic who is disillusioned by the conflict’s classist dimensions, Knight is compelled to desert after an adolescent kinsman is killed in battle. To the dismay of his wife Serena (Keri Russell), he thereafter teaches the folk of Jones County to violently resist the Confederacy’s tax collectors, putting him in the military’s sights and forcing him into the swamps. From there, Knight’s movement gradually grows to encompass hundreds of fellow deserters and escaped slaves. The film follows not only the company’s guerilla victories against C.S.A., but also the quavering affection that emerges between Knight and Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a slave and resistance double agent.
Knight is the sort of confounding, ahead-of-his-time figure that invites cinematic hagiography. (Indeed, his story has been adapted before, into the 1948 George Marshall feature Tap Roots.) While Free State of Jones takes liberties with his life, the film unassumingly overturns the quaint banality that characterizes so many historical dramas. The wildcat intensity of McConaughey’s performance aside, Jones is less taken with Knight as a character than as a porthole into the knotty forbidden lore of the Civil War and Reconstruction, from Southern Unionism to the viciousness of post-War Democratic vote suppression.
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Certainly, this is writer-director Gary Ross’s most socially and politically trenchant feature since his allegorical fantasy Pleasantville. Admirably, the filmmaker generally eschews purple monologues to focus on the tangible particulars of Southern power during the War and (uncommonly in American cinema) in the decades beyond. While there are missteps—most conspicuously, a structure that jarringly cross-cuts to a 20th-century descendant of Knight and Rachel—Jones is nonetheless a work of striking scope and confidence.
Free State of Jones opens Friday, June 24 in wide release.
