Free State of Jones vs Aim Small, Shoot Small

Last night my son and I went to see The Free State of Jones movie. I wrote about the upcoming film on another post back in March. We went to the late showing, so I went to bed at 1 am with images of the movie dancing around in my head. I probably dreamed about it, but really can’t remember this morning if I did.

I’ll say unequivocally say that fellow Texan Matthew McConaughey did one hell of a job portraying the complex and compelling man who the main character, Newton Knight, must have been. Either you like actor MM, or you don’t, when he gets deep into a character. I’d put his  performance in The Free State of Jones up there with his role in The Dallas Buyers Club. In both he portrays a man who is quiet most of the time, but utterly intense all the time. Driven. Going against those in control and helping others who are also under the thumb of an unreasoning and abusive authority. Yeah, a Robin Hood character, sort of. Maybe. And look at those eyes.

The Civil War aspect of the movie seems pretty well done. There’s a lot of grit and ill-fitting, rumpled, dirty uniforms on the Mississippi Confederates. The early battle scenes were bloody and filled with gore, reminding us that men don’t die cleanly when hit by a cannon ball. The field hospital scenes were bloody and pitiful. The scenes in the swamp made me utter a prayer of thanks for air-conditioning, while I sat in the really frosty theater.

Linking to my own Civil War stories, I’ve been anxious that my three main women characters are over-the-top in their propensity for violence, since all three of them finally use guns to dispatch bad men.

Boy, do I feel better about my Faith, Elizabeth and Edwina characters. after watching those Mississippi gals last night whip out their muskatoons, shotguns, and pistols and go about some serious getting even. No Mild Molly’s in my McBee novels or The Free State of Jones film.

Tens of thousands of farm women in the Civil War South were left alone and isolated to make do and keep the farm going without their menfolk who’d gone to soldiers. Many of those left-behind women lived in war zones. Did those real women often, or ever, finally get pushed to the point of gun violence to protect their homes and families from foraging soldiers from either army, or hungry deserters, or outlaws intent on rape? It’s not something you read about in period memoirs.

Son Todd and I expected the film to have clearer distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys, like Mel Gibson’s The Patriot movie about the American Revolution. (Aim small, shoot small, one of the great father-to-son instructions I haven’t forgotten from that film.) Not so for McConaughey’s new film, and that’s a compliment. Newton Knight and the others display lots of human flaws, unlike Gibson’s true-blue father-patriot character.

WARNING: BEGINNING PREACHING PARAGRAPH

In real life, we know when an act is right or wrong.  But…We’re people, and people can muddy the water very damned quickly, can’t we? We all get caught in circumstances where the contradictory commitments in our lives make it tough to do the right thing—even though we know which thing that is. It’s the hard choice, the choice we just don’t want to make because of uncomfortable consequences. Granted, we all have our moments of doing the right thing, and feel really good about doing so, smug even. And we all have moments of doing the other-easier- thing, or doing nothing, which is the same. All too often we choose not to rock the boat.  END OF PREACHING PARAGRAPH

Another personal sidebar about The Free State of Jones is that an ancestor, my great great great grandfather William Gill served as a private in the 6^th Mississippi Regiment. That’s the outfit featured in the film as the Confederate regiment sent to eliminate Newton Knight’s band of Unionists, deserters, and runaway slaves. And grandpa William would have been one of those dirt poor Rebel soldiers like Newton Knight had once been. Gramps Gill had a family and farm in Mississippi, and was drafted into the army, but he didn’t walk away like Newton Knight. Instead, whatever he thought about being a soldier, he stayed and soon got wounded and died.

On the surface, The Free State of Jones film appears to be a true history-based tale to illustrate that the Civil War in the South was a rich man’s war and poor man’s fight, exacerbated through military conscription laws that exempted sons of wealthy slave owners. The film clearly shows that slavery was brutal and bad and that reconstruction was brutal and bad. It even follows a plot thread of Newton Knight’s true-life grandson to underline that race relations between black and whites in Mississippi, until at least 1948, didn’t get much better.

The heart of the film, as voiced by McConauhey-Knight in so many words, was that all sorts of people, not just African-descended slaves, are subject to caste systems and circumstances which can make a nigger out of any of us. (Sorry to use the N word, but it’s a quote from the movie that fits.)

Race or religion certainly are usually, but not always, at play, even in our informal, but well-entrenched, American class system. Sometimes it’s politics, as happened when the Confederacy started running out of soldiers, but exempted sons of slave owners from the army draft. Equal rights are rarely equal, are they? Personally, I think that’s a fair lesson for a thoughtful action movie to embed within the violence and drama.

I'm glad Todd and I saw the film. But, it's a head-scratcher, not an "aim small, shoot small" sort of tale.

Since I’m on a movie roll here, we also went to see the Independence Day sequel. Nothing like a second alien invasion twenty years later. Happy June.