Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News
Service, Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World,
Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others.
He is the founder and editor of Movie
Nation.
This
may be the greatest indie epic ever, a documentary-real
historical film of scope, high stakes and great performances,
with future Oscar contenders first gaining notice in its
cast, some of the most hissable villains ever and history
so forgotten and so very important it’s probably
already banned in Florida.
As
a child of the Textile Town South who still gets choked-up
over “Norma Rae,” it’s this movie from
the mountainous coal country of my undergrad years that
remains my pick for THE classic to watch over Labor Day.
Sayles
made more iconic films — “Return of the Secaucus
Seven,” “Lianna” — and more popular
ones (“Eight Men Out,” “Lone Star”).
But this movie about the origins of The Mingo County War,
a touchstone moment in the history of Americans fighting
back and organizing to get a fair shake from murderously
predatory ownership, has to be his masterpiece.
It’s stunning to think about, miners of various
races and national origins joining hands to secure a living
wage, freedom from “owe my soul to the company store”
and working conditions that weren’t guaranteed to
kill them. Shortly after the events in Sayles’ movie,
sheriff’s deputies and hired gunmen were joined
by the state National Guard and Federal troops who machine-gunned
and bombed miners from WWI era aircraft — Americans
striking for a better life.
Sayles tells the story of efforts to organize men in railroad
towns so far up in the mountains “You have to pipe
the sunshine in.” His movie has “Norma Rae”
elements, strike breakers, union-busting goons and turncoats,
and a climax that is the “Gunfight at the OK Corral”
of the American labor movement.
His
tale involves a Hatfield from Hatfield & McCoy country
and mountaineer righteousness and prejudices, bravery
and pitiless mine owner-financed thuggery, with the tug
of war over miner’s souls even extending to the
pulpit, where competing interpretations of Biblical parables
served both sides.
Sayles
called on two-time Oscar winning cinematographer Haskell
Wexler (“Bound for Glory,” “Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf”) and locations in Thurmond,
West Virginia to take us back to 1920 Matewan, an area
and an era not far removed from the great timber clear-cutting
exploitation, right in the middle of the coal boom that
miners could hardly be said to have shared in.
I’ve
been to the real Matewan, which the intervening century
hasn’t changed all that much, and production designer
Nora Chavooshian, art director Dan Bishop and Wexler could
not have more perfectly recreated that remote hamlet along
the Tug Fork, and that time.
Future Oscar winner Chris Cooper made his big screen debut
as Joe Kenehan, labor organizer and pacifist who went
to prison rather than fight in World War I. Joe keeps
quiet on the train he rides in on, which is hauling in
strike-breaking Black scabs from Alabama, and which stops
short of town so that would-be strikers could “persuade”
them to turn back — violence enabled by pro-union
railroad folks, we figure.
James Earl Jones plays Few Clothes Johnson, elder statesman
among the imported unknowing strike-breakers. He doesn’t
take kindly to the label “scab,” or the idea
of being tricked into becoming one by Stone Mountain Coal.
They arrive in a town roiled by an economic downtown in
jobs which, because of one’s “contract”
with the company, all your pay went to company housing,
company medical care and “the company store.”
Mary McDonnell, a few years away from her “Passion
Fish” and “Dances with Wolves” Oscar
nominations, is the widowed boarding house keeper, leery
of the outside agitator but contemptuous of the company
that killed her husband. Her teen son (Will Oldham) is
a fifteen-year-old miner and lay preacher who is coming
around to the idea of a union.
Sayles
discovery and longtime collaborator David Strathairn (“L.A.
Confidential,” “Goodnight and Good Luck”)
is long, lean and tough town police chief Sid Hatfield,
who makes us wonder which side of the coming fracas he’ll
be on.
“I take care of my people,” he warns Kenehan.
“You bring ’em trouble, and you’re a
dead man. Sleep tight, Kenehan.”
Locals are played by veteran character actor Bob Gunton,
Josh Mostel (as the mayor) and Ken Jenkins, whose greatest
claim to fame came wearing a lab coat and telling his
underlings on TV’s “Scrubs” “What
has two thumbs and doesn’t give a crap? Bob Kelso!”
Here, he’s a bloody-minded lead-organizer among
the local miners, and damned good in the part.
And TV “Emergency” medic Kevin Tighe reinvented
himself and relaunched his career as the smirking, unscrupulous
and insulting Baldwin-Felts hired detective/goon Hickey,
one of the greatest movie villains ever.
Hickey’s sneering reply to the pretty widow (Nancy
Mette) who flirts and gets the name of every single male
to get off the train is as cruel as it gets.
“You are the best looking mountain trash I’ve
seen in a long time!” Hickey cackles in front of
his partner (Gordon Clapp).
Writer-director and sometime actor Sayles and his life
partner/producing partner and actress Maggie Renzi fill
two juicy supporting parts. He’s a fire and brimstone
and union-busting pastor, she’s a miner’s
wife who speaks only Italian, lots and lots of Italian.
Organizer Joe must make contacts among the factions and
make speeches, trying to mend fences and not get himself
murdered by the Baldwin-Felts thugs. If only he can get
the locals to stop using slurs and hating the Black and
Italian laborers brought in, they can find common cause.
“They
got you fightin’ white against colored, native against
foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know there ain’t
but two sides in this world – them that work and
them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s
all you get to know about the enemy.”
I’ve
always assumed that casting Jones — the biggest
name in the cast — in “Matewan” was
the tipping point that got the film financed and made,
but I can’t recall ever asking Sayles that the few
times I’ve interviewed him. Jones brings grand gravitas
and that larger than life sonorous voice and laugh to
his unsentimental Alabama miner with a conscience.
But
it’s hard to imagine this script not making it before
cameras. Sayles was a prolific and popular screenwriter
outside of his writing-directing efforts. Here, the simple
but perfectly-executed story arc has built-in treachery
that creates teeth-gritting suspense to launch the third
act. And the “Battle of Matewan,” when it
comes, is shocking, jolting and sad.
Sayles
sparingly uses an authentic old mountain man (J.K. Kent
Lilly) as eyewitness/voice-over narrator to double down
on the film’s sense of authenticity.
“Hit was hard times, and hit was hungry times”
the old timer recalls in Mountaineer speak.
Strathairn has never played a tougher character, hero
or villain, and Sayles give him lines appropriate for
a legendary figure like Sid Hatfield. His character’s
met the boss of this “detective” agency, Felts,
he tells the two menacing goons staring him down.
“I
wouldn’t piss on him if his heart was on fire.”
The labels that robber barons, oligarchs and their lemmings
lay on union folks — “socialist,” “Bolshevist,”
“Dirty Red” — are as familiar today
at they were in 1920 or 1987, when “Matewan”
came out.
That
underscores how out of step Sayles and his film were,
then and now. Boldly released in the middle of the Reagan/Bush
I “Greed is Good,” union-busting era, “Matewan”
was never going to be a blockbuster. With unions making
a comeback and the political tide turning, perhaps the
time to fully appreciate this American masterpiece, a
perfectly-crafted, beautifully-acted American indie cinema
“Potemkin,” will be this Labor Day, and Labor
Days to come.
