With his scraggly beard, yellow teeth, foreboding scowl, and deliberate limp, Matthew McConaughey’s (Amistad, A Time to Kill) portrayal of Newt Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War, is a far cry from the same man who was pigeonholing his career a decade earlier by playing the same character over and over in hit or miss romantic comedies like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch, The Wedding Planner, Fool’s Gold, and The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past to name a few. McConaughey reinvented himself three or four years ago and re-established himself as a dramatic leading man with the likes of The Lincoln Lawyer, Interstellar, HBO’s True Detective, Killer Joe, Mud, and Dallas Buyer’s Club, for which he won Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role at the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony. While he’s had his misses recently (has anyone even heard of 2016’s The Sea of Trees?), he has continued to have the ability to pick and choose his movies, and, unlike his string of romantic comedies, he continues to branch himself out further and further.

Newt isn’t exactly hiding. He knows the desertion punishment can range from an arrest to death, yet he doesn’t back down when confederate soldiers show up on his land. During the Civil War, the Confederacy had implemented a tax-in-kind system that basically allowed soldiers to raid people’s homesteads and take whatever they wanted in the name of the war effort, often leaving the families starving. Lieutenant Barbour (Bill Tangradi – Argo, FX’s Justified) is the movie’s main antagonist. A soldier himself, but not one who was actually fighting in the war, Barbour’s job was to enforce that tax in kind system. Traveling from farm to farm with three fellow soldiers, Barbour took what he wanted (most often food, livestock, and clothing) in the name of the Confederacy. Unfortunately, Barbour, and men like him, took what they wanted from the defenseless women and children. Newt taught the woman to defend themselves with guns and, in doing so, developed his own battle with Barbour.

Newt and wife Serena enlist the help of Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw – Concussion, Larry Crowne), a slave of a nearby plantation, who helps cure their ailing newborn with an herbal remedy and who then becomes an ally to the couple. After Newt’s stand to Barbour, it becomes clear that he can no longer hide at home. Rachel helps him escape to a nearby swamp, where he joins a small band of runaway slaves in a virtually impenetrable territory to those unfamiliar with the area. He quickly establishes a friendship with Moses (Mahershala Ali – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Place Beyond the Pines), the group leader. Soon these fugitives are joined by other runaway slaves and Confederate deserters, and before he knows it, Newt has a group of rebels and plenty of weapons. Their goal is not to exactly join the North but to attack the Confederate Army on their own. Their motivation is fueled by the fact that they are fighting a war that they don’t believe in for a group of rich plantation owners who aren’t even getting their hands dirty, coupled with the fact that their homes are being raided by soldiers who are abusing the tax in kind system. Rachel becomes one of our favorite characters in the movie because of her selflessness and her fearlessness. Unfortunately, the movie also alludes that her slave owner abused her sexually, making him just as vile of an antagonist as Lieutenant Barbour or his superior, the Confederate Commander Elias Wood (Thomas Francis Murphy – 12 Years a Slave, Terminator Genisys).

While this part of the story is pretty straightforward and easy to follow, there is actually a second story in 1949 and involves a white man on trial. His crime? He is 1/8th African American, and he married a white woman. This is illegal in Mississippi, and he’s being told to annul his marriage. We go back and forth with this story, but it’s not introduced when you think it should be. And we go back to this court scene at very infrequent intervals. It also feels really out of place at the beginning, but it does make sense as the movie progresses and really picks up steam at the end. Also, for whatever reason, Ross feels like he needs to give us periodic updates about the other happenings in the war. It was almost as if he felt like he needed to educate us because most of his updates had nothing to do with what was actually happening in the movie. I think it was more to let us know exactly what was happening in other parts of the country at the same time as his story. But, just like with the transitions to the 1949 court case, this frequency is inconsistent. We get almost known of these at the beginning, but a ton of them at the end. I learned nothing from these except for the fact that slavery continued to occur in the south even after the Emancipation Proclamation, masquerading itself as an apprenticeship program.

There is more about the plot of this movie that I could mention, but I don’t want to give away any spoilers. I’m sorry if I gave some away already. I attempted to be vague. This brings up a good time to time in this review to mention numerous similarities between Free State of Jones and 2000s The Patriot with Mel Gibson. While The Patriot was based upon the Revolutionary War, you still had its star oppose participating in the conflict. You also had disgruntled leaders in Newt Knight and Benjamin Martin who spearheaded a group of strangers who believed in the same cause and who, unlawfully, started a rebellion. There was the one main adversary that each movie’s star seemed to have a personal feud with. In Free State of Jones, Lieutenant Barbour almost came across as a saint when you compare him against Col. William Tavington (Jason Isaacs), the main foe in The Patriot. You had the burning of churches, the locals who gathered the courage to stand up for themselves, and the brutal deaths of some of your favorite characters. But I wasn’t nearly as moved passionately watching Free State of Jones as I was The Patriot. Gibson’s portrayal of Martin was one with more emotion. McConaughey depicted Newt, who, for the most part, acted on ration more than rage, despair, or empathy. And that’s not to say McConaughey did a poor job. Quite the opposite, actually. Newt Knight was just a different man than Benjamin Martin. Now keep in mind that I know that Benjamin Martin was a completely fictional character, composed of, I think, four different people during the Revolutionary War. And after doing my research, I learned that Newt might not have been the classy and markedly man he was portrayed to be. After seeing Free State of Jones (and I hope you do), I encourage you to check out Free State of Jones vs. the True Story of Newton Knight/ which lists which parts of the story were fictional and which were based more soundly on fact. Just like with any movie, you want the story to be 100% factual, but that’s not always the case because often it can blur the goals for the movie or it might make the movie less dramatic, or there isn’t enough recorded documentation to verify if the entire story is true. Regardless of the fact, I felt that Free State of Jones took me down a path of history that I knew nothing about, and for that, I was grateful.

Plot 8/10
Character Development 8/10
Character Chemistry 7.5/10
Acting 7/10
Screenplay 7/10 (first two-thirds were brilliant…the last third saw this movie trying to evolve into a completely different movie…while that story was important, it felt disconnected from the rest of the movie)
Directing 7/10 (see above…Ross really needed to tighten this up some for it to have the cohesive flow that he worked hard to establish early on)
Cinematography 9/10
Sound 8/10 (subdued and effective)
Hook and Reel 7.5/10 (the 2 hours 20 minute run time wasn’t the problem as much as it was that there were an additional 30-40 minutes tacked on to this movie when you anticipated it being over)
Universal Relevance 9/10 (important story to be told…even if the story was fiction and even if we only were presented with one side, the hero side, of Newton Knight)
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