Free State of Jones (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Free State of Jones is a 2016 American historical war film about Newton Knight, who led an armed revolt against the Confederacy.

  Gary Ross wrote and directed the film, casting Matthew McConaughey as Knight in a story set in Jones County, Mississippi, during the Civil War.

  The site's critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes read, "Free State of Jones has the noblest of intentions, but they aren't enough to make up for its stilted treatment of a fascinating real-life story." That gap between good intentions and execution runs through the whole film.

  How did Knight's stand in Jones County turn into an armed rebellion, and what did it cost the people who fought beside him? What did it take to get this story onto movie screens, and why did critics still disagree about how well it succeeded?

• 2. Desertion And Sanctuary

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  Newton Knight deserts the Confederate Army after learning of the Twenty Negro Law and watching his nephew Daniel die during the Second Battle of Corinth. He carries Daniel's body home to Ellisville and reconnects with his wife, Serena.

  Rachel is an enslaved woman on a neighboring plantation who has secretly taught herself to read. She treats Knight's infant son through an illness, and the two become friends.

  Newton's disenchantment with the Confederacy deepens as soldiers seize crops, livestock, and supplies from neighbors already struggling to feed their families. He threatens a Confederate officer, Lieutenant Barbour, at gunpoint. When militiamen are sent to arrest him for treason, one of their dogs bites him as he tries to escape.

  Aunt Sally, a sympathetic community leader with abolitionist leanings, sends her servant George to guide Knight into the swamps. There, runaway slave Moses Washington and his followers shelter Knight and nurse him back to health. Knight recovers under their protection, and the swamp will not stay quiet once Confederate deserters begin arriving in Jones County.

• 3. The Free State Declared

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  After the fall of Vicksburg, Confederate deserters flock into Jones County, and Knight persuades his neighbors to hand over weapons. He organizes the deserters, together with escaped slaves, into a disciplined Southern Unionist militia.

  When the militia starts ambushing military convoys to reclaim stolen property, Barbour and his commanding officer, Colonel Hood, order the militiamen's farms burned. Serena is forced to flee with her son because Knight can no longer protect them. Hood offers a full pardon to any Unionist willing to rejoin the Confederate Army. When some of Knight's men take him up on the offer, Hood breaks his word and has them hanged.

  The surviving Unionists ask Hood for permission to hold a funeral for the hanged men under military guard, and he agrees. Sharpshooters hidden beneath the church floor and inside the coffins open fire on the Confederate guards as mourners pull pistols from their coats. The soldiers are killed, and Knight strangles Colonel Hood to death with his own belt. Barbour escapes, but the Unionists drive the remaining Confederate troops out of the county.

  The rebels declare the establishment of what they call the Free State of Jones and swear allegiance to the United States federal government. They go on to defend their territory against Confederate reinforcements for the rest of the war. That declaration of independence from the Confederacy is only the first fight Knight takes on; peace will bring a new one.

• 4. A Legacy Under Mississippi Law

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  Newton Knight keeps fighting racial inequality after the war ends, starting by helping free Moses Washington's son from an "apprenticeship" to Rachel's former master. When Moses Washington is lynched while registering freedmen to vote, Knight responds by marching with voters to the polls while they sing "John Brown's Body."

  Knight eventually reconciles with Serena, and he also has a son with Rachel. Because Mississippi law will not let Knight and Rachel marry, he arranges for her to be deeded a parcel of his land. She is to farm it after his death.

  The film's final scene jumps ahead to 1948, when Knight's great-grandson, Davis Knight, is arrested under Mississippi's anti-miscegenation law. Because Davis Knight has one-eighth black ancestry, the law classifies him as black. He is ordered to annul his marriage to his white wife, and he refuses. He is sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to leave the state.

  The Mississippi Supreme Court reverses his conviction in 1949. It is unwilling to let the case test the law's constitutionality just as the civil rights movement is gaining strength. That 1949 reversal closes the film's story, but Gary Ross spent years making sure the history behind it held up to scrutiny.

• 5. A Decade Of Research

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  Ten years separate Gary Ross's first interest in this story from its final shooting script, and he calls it a passion project. He says he is drawn to the project by a desire to examine the Reconstruction era South. He feels that era is poorly represented on film. Ross points to Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation as, in his words, "the last movies that did it... both of which didn't tell the truth."

  Ross does what he calls a "tremendous amount of research." He studies not just the Civil War but also its historiography, the way historians have written and rewritten the story over time. He wants to "debunk a lot of the myths" surrounding the events, he says. Speaking to Slash Film about his research, Ross remarked, "I don't think I did anything but read for a couple of years."

  Ross finishes the screenplay before starting work on The Hunger Games, but struggles for years to find financing. He believes working on The Hunger Games will help his cause, so he turns down the chance to direct its sequels. Even so, he still has trouble getting Free State of Jones made, which he attributes to the fact that, in his words, "we're in a different kind of a popcorn universe now."

  The finished film credits its story to Ross and Leonard Hartman. Its history draws on two books by other authors. One is The Free State of Jones by Victoria E. Bynum. The other is The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer.

  Ross's research pays off first on a movie set, not a page, once cameras start rolling in Louisiana.

• 6. From Script To Screen

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  Matthew McConaughey's casting as Newton Knight is announced in November 2014. The rest of the cast, including Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mahershala Ali, and Keri Russell, is announced in early 2015. Angelo Piazza III of Marksville, Louisiana, brings his company, Jack's Powder Keg Company, onto the production to supply its cannon and black powder.

  Principal photography begins on the 23rd of February 2015 and is scheduled to wrap on the 28th of May. On the 9th of March, Adam Fogelson, chairman of STX Entertainment, announces the start of production in and around New Orleans. He releases a first-look photo to mark the occasion. By May, the crew is shooting in Clinton, using East Feliciana Parish as a filming location. On the 25th of May, some filming takes place at Chicot State Park near Ville Platte.

  STXfilms pushes the release back twice, from the 11th of March 2016 to the 13th of May, and finally to the 24th of June 2016. The first trailer arrives on the 9th of January 2016. Universal Studios Home Entertainment later releases the film on Digital HD on the 6th of September 2016. DVD and Blu-ray follow on the 20th of September.

  Free State of Jones opens on the 24th of June 2016 in 2,815 theaters, alongside Independence Day: Resurgence and The Shallows. The film is projected to gross around $10 million in its opening weekend. Instead it earns just $365,000 in Thursday previews and $2.7 million on its first day. Its opening weekend total comes to $7.6 million, landing in sixth place at the box office. It finishes sixth, behind Finding Dory's $73 million and Independence Day: Resurgence's $41 million. Central Intelligence earns $18.2 million, The Shallows earns $16.8 million, and The Conjuring 2 earns $7.7 million that same weekend. The film ultimately grosses $20.8 million in North America and $4.2 million overseas, for a worldwide total of $25 million against its $50 million budget.

  Composer Nicholas Britell scores the film, writing pieces such as "Battle of Corinth" and "Killing the Colonel." The soundtrack also folds in older material: Stephen Foster's "Beautiful Dreamer" and the traditional tune "Soldier's Joy." George Frederick Root's "Battle Cry of Freedom" also appears on the soundtrack. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis contribute the song "What Must Be Done," while Lucinda Williams writes and performs "I'm Crying" for the soundtrack.

  None of those numbers, though, settle the argument critics would have about what kind of story Free State of Jones actually tells.

• 7. The White Savior Debate

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  On Rotten Tomatoes, Free State of Jones holds a 48% approval rating from 192 reviews, with an average score of 5.5 out of 10. Metacritic gives it a score of 53 out of 100 based on 38 critics, which the site classifies as "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore grade the film an average of "A-" on a scale that runs from A+ to F.

  Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday writes that Gary Ross "has insisted that he didn't want Free State of Jones to become another white savior movie, but that's precisely what it is, especially during scenes when the murderous injustice of slavery is refracted through Knight's frustrated tears." Hornaday argues the film could have sidestepped that trope by focusing more on Knight's alliance with a former slave. She also points to his relationships with his wife and an enslaved house servant.

  The Atlantic's Vann R. Newkirk II goes further, writing that "to say that McConaughey's portrayal of Newton Knight is a white savior perhaps undersells the trope." Newkirk argues that "a better film would have muddled the clean white-savior narrative with an actual exploration of what the racial politics of a mixed-race insurgency in the South might have been like."

  The New York Times names Free State of Jones a "critic's pick," with reviewer A. O. Scott calling it "a neglected and fascinating chapter in American history." Scott writes that the film uses "the tools of Hollywood spectacle to restore a measure of clarity to our understanding of the war and its aftermath." He adds that the story is "not yet another film about a white savior sacrificing himself on behalf of the darker-skinned oppressed," nor a tale "of a white sinner redeemed by the superhuman selflessness of black people." Scott calls it, instead, "a rarer thing: a film that tries to strike sparks of political insight from a well-worn genre template."

  New Yorker critic Richard Brody takes the most favorable view, describing Newton Knight as "not so much as a savior but as an avatar of a new South." Brody writes that by understanding his own interests and the social and economic structure of his region, Knight is able to "transcend heritage and history and to forge a community, both during and after the war, that will be fair, inclusive," and, in Brody's words, "post-racial."