Free State of Jones

Last night I went with my parents to see Free State of Jones which is an incredibly powerful movie about a rebellion against the Confederacy during the Civil War.  Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey) is a medic in the Confederate army who becomes disillusioned after witnessing his nephew's death in battle.  He deserts in order to take his nephew's body home to Jones County, Mississippi and discovers that the Confederate army has been confiscating grain and livestock from the poor farmers in the area.  In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, he helps a widow and her daughters stand up to the soldiers, thereby placing a price on his head.  He is helped by a group of runaway slaves to escape into a swamp and is soon joined by other deserters.  Knight leads this ragtag group against the Confederate army, eventually taking control of a large area of Mississippi.  After the war, he tries to hold this coalition together to fight for the rights of the freed slaves during Reconstruction but the alliance is fragile.  Some of these scenes are very upsetting, such as when one of the freed slaves (Mahershala Ali) is lynched for registering voters and when the Ku Klux Klan burns down their church.  There is also a subplot involving the relationship between Knight and one of the freed slaves (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and a trial in the 1950s involving one of their descendants who was arrested for a racially impure marriage.  As I previously mentioned, this is a very difficult movie to watch at times but I found it to be incredibly compelling, especially since it is based on actual events.  McConaughey is outstanding as the charismatic leader, especially in the scenes where he rallies his group to action (I think McConaughey was a fire-and-brimstone preacher in another life).  I really enjoyed the use of Mathew Brady's iconic Civil War photographs interspersed throughout the movie to give historical context (something director Gary Ross also did very effectively in Seabiscuit).  The movie is quite long with a running time of 2:19 (the omission of the trial of Newton's great-grandson might have made it tighter) but I found Knight's story to be riveting.  I haven't been able to stop thinking about it and I highly recommend it.