Free State of Jones review: McConaughey misses the mark in Mississippi

Clocking in at well over two hours, this dour, intermittently involving tale of the US Civil War outstays its welcome, but there is, paradoxically, a better, longer film bursting to get out. Packing in too many topics – state rights, miscegenation, Reconstruction – within one groaning package, the picture ends up short-changing almost every one.

The hackneyed notion of the white saviour would seem a little less offensive if there had been more time to develop the African-American characters. Maybe, Free State of Jones would have worked better as a television series.

The film begins with Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a medic of suspiciously modern sensibilities, surviving the Battle of Corinth and making his way home to Mississippi. Even at this early stage of the war, the Confederacy is reduced to pillaging its own people’s property for supplies.

Meanwhile, wealthy slave owners are declared exempt from service in a truly horrible conflict (the opening scenes remind us how the Civil War gestured forwards to the trench battles of the first World War).

Eventually, after defending one family from the martial looters, he flees for the swamps where he meets up with escaped slaves and other white dissenters. Separated from his wife, Knight becomes close to a slave (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who works as a healer.

The true story of Jones County is lost in a jumble of competing narratives. Was it an exclave of the Union? Was it a sort of anarchist collective? How integrated were its black inhabitants?

Free State of Jones is deliciously shot by Benoît Delhomme and admirably played by a strong cast, but it remains a frustrating beast throughout. Here is a film that is too sensitive to use the n-word as much as it would surely be used and not sensitive enough to grant the African-American characters fully developed personalities.

Oddest of all is the bizarrely sketchy framing sequence concerning a miscegenation trial involving a Knight descendent in the 1940s. There already is a better film on that subject. It is called Loving and it will be released in February.