'Free State of Jones': Matthew McConaughey's Civil War epic sure is long

Not everyone in the South supported slavery or rallied behind the Confederacy in its fight against Washington.

It's a trite, obvious point, but it bears repeating given the gross generalizations about the South we get in so many Civil War movies.

Oscar-nominated writer, producer, and director Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games) hammers home that point most insistently and repetitiously in Free State of Jones, a pedantic, overlong 139-minute epic about Newton Knight, a little-known real-life hero from Jones County, Miss., who took up arms against Johnny Reb.

Mixing elements from documentaries, biopics, war flicks, and Hallmark romances, Ross' film is a living history tour, but with gory special effects and a smoldering smattering of sex appeal.

The sizzle is provided by Matthew McConaughey as Knight and the delightful British up-and-comer Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Concussion, Jupiter Ascending) as Rachel, who's his wife and partner in crime, and a former slave.

A poor farmer from Jones County, Knight was so disgusted by the economic motives behind the South's secession that he deserted from the Confederate Army. As McConaughey breaks it down to his fellow soldiers in rather simplistic terms, the fat cats who own plantations get rich exploiting free slave labor and then safeguard their wealth by sending off impoverished white folks to fight their wars.

Knight recruits fellow deserters and runaway slaves to form a guerrilla army in support of the Union, arguing that they share the same enemy. Constructed of tightly edited episodes, Free State of Jones uses on-screen text to document dates and locations as it follows his activities through the last three years of the war.

Ross documents everything - including the violent battle scenes and the budding love story between Knight and Rachel - with a studied, cool detachment. It's a blessing: There's so much melodrama here, a more emotive approach would have yielded a sickly sweet soap opera.

The film reaches a natural climax with the end of the war, but then it keeps going - and going and going - through Reconstruction, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the adoption of Jim Crow laws.

There's even a subplot about Davis Knight, a great-grandson of Newton Knight and Rachel, who was tried and convicted in 1946 of breaking Mississippi's laws against interracial marriage.

I admire Ross for his refusal to end the story on a note of false hope: He follows through on the history of Jones County to show how life for freed slaves and their descendants would not fundamentally change for a century.

But it's just too much history for a single film. Instead of making us hungry for more, we feel overwhelmed.

tirdad@phillynews.com

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Free State of Jones

2 1/2 stars (Out of four stars).

Directed by Gary Ross. With Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Keri Russell, Mahershala Ali. Distributed by STX Entertainment.

Running time: 2 hours, 19 mins.

Parent's guide: R (brutal battle scenes and disturbing graphic images).

Playing at: Area theaters.

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