Matthew McConaughey plays a former Confederate soldier.
Fascinating historical footnotes can make for an interesting movie, provided the filmmaker isn’t determined to expand a footnote to David Foster Wallace-esque proportions. In Free State of Jones, co-writer and director Gary Ross takes on the Civil War-era true story of Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a farmer in Jones County, Miss., who comes to lead a rag-tag group of army deserters, irate fellow farmers and escaped slaves in a guerrilla battle against the Confederacy.
Ross does an effective job of setting up his conflict as an uprising against the Southern one-percenters. But though the Civil War ends in 1865, this story follows Knight for another 10 years, and even introduces a court case some 80 years later involving one of Knight’s descendants. McConaughey’s Knight remains — despite his decidedly unique personal relationships — a figure with little to define him besides his righteousness. The intent may be to show the right-side-of-history consequences of fighting for seemingly lost causes, but the result is a film that rambles on, assuming that everything that happened to this man was equally worth putting in a movie.