Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN VEINS THAT RUN DEEP SAYLES'S 'MATEWAN' Matewan is close to being a great film. The word should be (and has been, in this col umn) used rarely; but in style and content this work...
...but perhaps the clearest index of Sayles's refusal to surrender to even a trace of shlock is his avoidance of romance between them...
...Much of Kenehan's work involves either turning the other cheek to their provocations, or persuading the local Scotch-Presbyterian miners to unite with black and Italian "scabs" who have also sickened of Blue Mountain Coal...
...In all aspects of Matewan, Sayles has found a story in real life that rings true with religious and moral significance...
...By identifying the original historical value of unions in protecting the worker, Matewan marks the Year of the Lame Duck...
...If you ain't with the company, there ain't no work," a hardbitten mountain woman tells a suspicious-looking newcomer in town, Joe Kenehan...
...even with defects, all are memorable films...
...626 These same mountains once provided one of the best openings of any American movie: the initial twenty minutes of Coal Miner's Daughter," where camera, Sissy Spacek, and her father (Levon Helm) magically spun film into myth...
...he labors to prevent the shoot-outs that loom between miners and company killers, especially the slick, sadistic Mr...
...Through her, Sayles addresses the forgetful contemporary audience, many of them tempted by conservative propaganda to reduce unionism to scandal...
...He is forced to work in the mines but gifted with the power of eloquent preaching...
...By carefully evoking the religious atmosphere in the West Virginia hills, Sayles manages to renew the convention: the battle between good and evil that he presents feels much less like cinema's generic "apocalypse" than the real thing, with its genuine stakes...
...Indeed, Sayles is unafraid of comedy spoiling the somberness of the story, and uses it to enrich our sense of the full, unwooden reality of the characters...
...Sayles consistently gets high results from low budgets...
...Miller...
...Drawling hillbillies, diverted when hunting, lackadaisically save the miners from a company attack...
...His second,Lianna, dealt with a woman caught between leaving her husband and experimenting with lesbian love on a richer, less lurid level than later movies like Desert Hearts...
...TOM O'BRIEN 627...
...it also fit well into the "downhome' ' nostalgic superficiality of the late Carter/early Reagan years...
...For this, Sayles may thank his production crew (mostly female, especially the production designer, Nora Chavooshian), cinematographer (Haskell Wexler), and mostly no-name cast who have worked hard and successfully to reclaim the sufferings of backwoods folk from film and country music cliche...
...But the richness of this film is most evident in Sayles's treatment of love and religion...
...Sayles used country gospel singer Hazel Dickens and blues harmonica master John Hammond to provide one of the most dramatically integrated soundtracks in a nonmusical film in some time...
...Jones's mostly quiet, wonderful work here recalls both Paul Robeson's in How Green Was My Valley and the real-life "red" idealism that got Robeson into such trouble...
...Sayles set his cameras just down river from the Hatfields and McCoys (indeed, one Sid Hatfield turns up here, mighty quick on the draw), where the Blue Mountain Coal Company owns everything around, not excluding a few souls...
...but in style and content this work comes .close...
...All films involving violence these days move toward an "apocalypse," a grand climactic moment when the microcosmic world in the film seems close to bursting...
...Jones dissolves the tension with one grand bit of comic relief...
...his target is that ideology itself...
...He only allows Radnor one grand, keening cry at the close...
...Music (with blacks on harmonicas, Italians on mandolins, natives on fiddles) is nicely used to literalize the eventual harmony among the victims...
...Hickey (Kevin Tighe) and the sick, sadistic Griggs (Gordon Clapp)—two vivid monsters who come less by way ofHigh Noon than McCabe and Mrs...
...Sayles's suspense thrives, mainly because of the film's evocation of place, a small town in the back hollows of West Virginia...
...The film's most thrilling moments occur when Danny, allowed to preach but forbidden political references, uses the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife to save his "Joseph," Joe Kenehan...
...The tension building up to shoot-outs in Matewan at times nears that in High Noon...
...H'it were 1920," the film's narrator, a young mountain boy, tells us in his authentic sounding first line...
...But Kenehan is an innocent committed to nonviolence...
...A wife of an Italian miner, so horrified when her husband joins the "syndicato" that she prays desperately before icons of Mary, falls into constant serio-comic squabbles with a severe Protestant miner's mom...
...The film's only defect is pace, which feels a tad slow at times...
...But he also respects belief (a rarity among filmmakers), and constantly switches from union to church meetings without (a la Marx) treating the latter as opiate...
...Radnor's son, Danny (Will Oldham), is the film's narrator, a fifteen-year-old blond-haired kid, even more of an innocent than Kenehan...
...at least Matewan uses a clear, clean lens...
...In Matewan, a real-life story of coal miners making brave attempts to form a union in the "red scare" days after World War One, Sayles has finally put everything together: story, acting, costume, sets, and his fine writing...
...Sayles is after bigger game...
...Kenehan boards at first in the rooming house owned by the company (of course) but run by Elma Radnor (Mary MacDonell), who had lost her husband in a mining fire...
...Sayles compensates with some thrilling suspense as the miners try to resist the brutal power of company thugs attempting to break their strike...
...Everything thereafter is authentic as well...
...His first film...
...His screenplays also continually tackle innocence— enjoyed, lost, regained —as if their stories simply mirrored his roots in the civil rights and antiwar movements and his struggle to maintain quality in cinema today...
...The Return of the Secaucus Seven, a study of a reunion of sixties radicals in the Age of Reagan, preceded The Big Chill and beat it in depth as well...
...Indeed, Sayles makes Kenehan, a union organizer, his hero...
...The taste involved here is superb...
...Its writer and director, independent filmmaker John Sayles, doesn't follow trends, but sets or deflects them...
...Both in the understated style and thoughtful content of his films, Sayles has always been trying to keep the best of the 1960s alive...
...The best of art can only see through a glass darkly...
...All of these films have been produced outside of the Hollywood studio system...
...But that film slid downhill, so to speak, once it settled into a "star" biography (of Loretta Lynn...
...Few Clothes" Johnson (James Earl Jones) leads the blacks into Kenehan's union, which becomes Sayles's image of interracial harmony and equality...
...You have two choices in this town," Danny explains to Kenehan, "hardshell Baptist or soft-shell Baptist," and at the "hard-shell" Sayles himself plays a comically absurd fire-and-brimstone preacher...
...In Brother from Another Planet, Sayles even managed to add a twist to cliched sci-fi with original, gentle, mock heroic...
...Matewan is a historical film only in Santayana's sense: those who forget the past are bound to repeat it...
...The word should be (and has been, in this column) used rarely...
...Through him, Sayles treats religion respectfully but not reverently...
...Admiration and affection grow between the two...
...Sayles also uses Jones in one tense scene in the middle of the film, when the miners have been duped into thinking Kenehan is a spy...
...Kenehan (well played by the relatively unknown Chris Cooper) is unembarrassed in calling himself a "red" or reciting tales of the Wobblies...
Vol. 114 • November 1987 • No. 19
