I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
It’s a problem lately with lots of Hollywood movies… and some not-Hollywood movies, too. The same sorts of stories — often literally the same stories, as with reboots and remakes — are getting told over and over again, and with little apparent notion that what is required is a good reason to tell those same stories again. And here we go again.
To say that tales of Tarzan have been told before is an almost absurd understatement: he has been a mainstay of cinema since the silent era. And while The Legend of Tarzan is only very loosely based on the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, screenwriters Adam Cozad (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and Craig Brewer (Footloose, Black Snake Moan) have managed to come up with a version of his story that is even more retrograde than anything the author invented. It’s as if they went out of their way to avoid any pretense of relevance or significance to modern audiences, and then took a longer detour to be as offensive as possible.
Clearly, Cozad and Brewer have some idea that retelling an already oft-told tale is not acceptable on its own: they skip right over Tarzan’s origins to, as the film opens, introduce us to a John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (Alexander Skarsgård: Zoolander 2, The Diary of a Teenage Girl), who has already settled back into his ancestral home in England with American wife Jane (Margot Robbie: The Big Short, Focus); a few flashbacks fill in the details of his childhood among apes, but it’s not a significant part of the story here. Instead, the movie has to work hard to get Clayton back to Congo on a mission for the British government to investigate some nefarious doings there that the king of Belgium seems to be behind. Clayton doesn’t want to go, and the convincing that American agent George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson: The Hateful Eight, Barely Lethal) does to get him onboard — the US government is also worried about the Congo situation — is never actually, you know, convincing. Not to Clayton — he just sort of gives in, because there’d be no movie if he didn’t — and certainly not to us. We have no idea why Clayton agrees to go back to Africa, nor any idea what he hopes to get out of the trip. The man we are supposed to be identifying with is a bland nonentity, the fault of both the script, which doesn’t bother to give him much in the way of motivation, and of Skarsgård, who gives him no personality. The actor exerts no presence at all; he may be very pretty, but that’s no substitute for the sort of charisma we expect from the hero of would-be escapist fantasy action adventure.
Once in Africa, some very tedious procedural stuff uncovers Christoph Waltz (Spectre, Big Eyes) as a baddie who is after Congo’s diamonds on behalf of the Belgians. It’s all very solemn and very dull, including the often incoherent action sequences. (Director David Yates, whose previous credits include the final four Harry Potter films, cannot seem to figure out why he’s here either.) Jane’s insistence that she is no damsel in distress is entirely undercut by the script’s casting of her as nothing else; Waltz kidnaps her to lure Tarzan into a trap he’s set. Yawn.
But the worst thing is the movie’s unironic — indeed, seemingly utterly oblivious — treatment of the local people and the local landscapes as a battleground for warring white men. The only explanation for setting this movie a generation before Burroughs’s Tarzan stories — it’s around 1890 here, but the Tarzan of the novels wasn’t even born until 1889 — is to exploit the theme of colonial Europeans stealing the region’s natural resources, a motif that could, theoretically, certainly still have relevance for today (and, indeed, could have also worked had the movie adhered to the novels’ chronology and was set during or just after World War I). But it’s handled in such a desultory manner that it barely even registers as anything other than an excuse to have Tarzan come to the rescue of generic Africans; even the members of the one tribe that Clayton (and Jane) have past and apparently loving relationships with are barely characters. The finale, in which hordes of nameless African tribal warriors stand around and cheer as Clayton singlehandedly thwarts Waltz’s scheme, and hence the Belgians’, is insulting. It isn’t just the epitome of the embarrassing white-savior narrative that no filmmaker should have dared to deploy in the 21st century, but it also lacks even the iota of historical hindsight required to realize that the troubles of an Africa bedeviled by Europeans were very, very far from being defeated.
but how do white men feel about racism?
So much worse, however, is Free State of Jones. You would think that all the stories there are to be told about black Americans during the Civil War — they had some small involvement, after all — had already been told; I guess that thrilling action drama about Harriet Tubman, Union spy and military leader, has been remade too many times to count, right? And so, desperate Hollywood — as embodied by screenwriter and director Gary Ross (The Hunger Games, Seabiscuit) — had no other choice but to finally get around to the true(ish) tale of Newton Knight, a deserting Confederate soldier who turned Robin Hood and guerrilla warrior against the rebels and set up his own self-proclaimed independent, Union-loyal (this may not have been true) state in Jones County, Mississippi.
Ross is so keen to be seen as historically accurate that he has created an entire web site of footnotes — FreeStateOfJones.info — to meticulously document the research that backs up his movie. As a resource on the time, it is superb. As justification for his film, it’s nothing of the sort. One major issue with Jones is not its historicity but the way it frames the story it wants to tell. Footnotes cannot excuse Ross’s depiction of Knight — portrayed physically ably, if not with any particular psychological insight, by Matthew McConaughey (Interstellar, The Wolf of Wall Street) — as the man who unites a group of runaway slaves who’ve been hiding out in a swamp; they’ve apparently just been hangin’ around doin’ nothing until the white man gives them a purpose. And there’s really no excuse for most of them to be undifferentiated furniture hovering in the background for most of the movie; their characters and personalities are meant to be wrapped up in one wholly fictional character, Moses (Mahershala Ali: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, The Place Beyond the Pines), a guessed-at composite of former slaves that Knight may have allied himself with.
Historical accuracy does not excuse Jones’s portrait of slave Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw [Concussion, Jupiter Ascending], wasted here), who would later become Knight’s second wife, though he never quite divorced his first one, Serena (Keri Russell: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Austenland). Rachel’s most dramatic scene entails her telling Knight about how she is continually raped by her owner, which then descends into her comforting Knight, he’s that upset to hear this. That’s right: the institutionalized rape of a woman by a man who is legally her owner matters most here for how it makes a man feel. That is absolutely disgusting, and absolutely emblematic of what happens when even stories about nonwhite and/or nonmale people get filtered through white men’s eyes.
Though Jones may have an even better — and by that, I mean, an even worse — example of the problems inherent in white men’s stories dominating pop culture. Among Jones’s many problems as a movie, on the basic level of engaging storytelling, is that it crams way too much into even its overlong two hours and 19 minutes runtime; after the war ends, it begins scanning the horrors of Reconstruction and the ways into which slavery was reintroduced in all but name (as with “apprenticeship” schemes); this is when the film really starts to feel like a lecture, or a bad parody of a Ken Burns documentary, rather than what is supposed to be primarily a narrative story. Jones tries to cover so much ground that it would be better served as a 10- or 20-episode miniseries (which would also give all the neglected, ie, non-Knight, characters room to breath and be people). The most bizarre tangent the movie goes off on is the occasional flashes forward to the 1948 trial, also in Mississippi, of a descendant of Knight, Davis Knight (Brian Lee Franklin), who is accused of miscegenation, or race mixing, after marrying a white woman. Davis Knight looks — and had heretofore been treated — as a white man, but Mississippi law held that someone with even “one drop” of black blood, or even one black ancestor, no matter how far removed, was considered black. So Davis Knight’s trial is meant to determine whether he was the descendent of Newton and Serena or Newton and Rachel, and hence whether he should be considered “legally” white or “legally” black.
The Mississippi laws involved with this trial are utterly abhorrent, as are the attitudes about race on display, but once again, Jones puts all the focus on a man who is, for all intents and purposes, white, and who had, as far as we can determine, never been impacted by racism at all previously. If there’s one underlying unifying theme of Free State of Jones, it’s this: “How do white men feel about racism, and how does it affect them?” This is very low down on the list of concerns about racism, and quite possibly the least interesting sort of story to be told about racism. The only thing it’s “good” for is fueling and justifying white-savior narratives. And we’ve had more than enough of those already.
I suppose one advantage of using the Belgian Congo is that even the colonial apologists won’t defend what the Belgians got up to there.
I couldn’t care less about Tarzan (he’s about as relevant to me as the Lone Ranger, and similarly a near-forgotten part of the pop-cultural ambience of my childhood) but I had hopes for Jones. Oh well.
Gary Ross made a mistake by trying to reduce Newt Knight’s activities into a 2 hour movie. A mini-series would have been insufficient to cover the whole of his long life as an activist.
I must correct the author of this article in her insinuations that Ross somehow exaggerated Knight’s accomplishments. On the contrary, he diminished them, particularly as regards his work during Reconstruction.
Republican Gov. Adalbert Ames appointed Knight (as a battle-tested soldier) to head an otherwise all-black regiment which fought against the incipient KKK and protected voting rights of freedmen. Knight also was charged by Ames with leading raids against plantations which were maintaining children in slavery through the apprenticeship “laws”.
Ross, in fact, diminished the importance of Knight’s activities – probably to avoid the dreaded ‘white savior’ label. Knight actually was a white savior and a man who, unlike his ally Jasper Collins, was unable to pursue a career in politics because of his relationship with his common-law wife Rachel, a former slave.
Read Prof. Bynum’s “Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War”.
The author of this article must live in some country where all things are politically correct, history has been carefully revised to excise all the evil and Donald Trump, who is openly racist, is not running for President. The State of Mississippi still incorporates the Confederate flag in its state flag. The DNC removed it from the Convention. There exists a widespread, accepted theory on the Civil War – promoted by racist politicians in the South – called the “Lost Cause”: the Civil War was about states rights, not slavery. The North invaded the South and all Southerners (rich planters and poor yeoman farmers) were united in their devotion to the cause.
The story of Newt Knight and Jasper Collins (who got short shrift in the movie) is the story of what really happened in the South during the Civil War – the poor being manipulated by the rich planters in defense of their wealth (=slaves). Knight led a class rebellion which crossed racial and gender lines. Women fought as hard as men against the Confederacy.
Free State of Jones is the first film ever to examine Southern Unionists. There were numerous rebellions in the South against the Confederacy, the Jones County rebellion was notable for the fact it did cross lines of race, largely because of the relationship between Newt and Rachel Knight. It is also the first film of the modern era to examine Reconstruction in realistic terms and to underline how the Black Codes came to replace slavery with new forms of humiliation for freedmen.
I must correct the commenter and point out that I did no such thing.
I have no idea what this means, or how it relates to my review. Are you suggesting that because Donald Trump is running for president, I should have given this movie a pass? If so, I would *love* to hear your justifications for this.
You linked to a “Lost Cause” “historian” at an obscure Louisiana college as an “expert” on Newton Knight rather than Prof. Bynum, Prof. Stauffer or others who are preeminent experts on the Jones County uprising.
You have, unwittingly no doubt, become an ally of neo-Confederates who have been spamming every forum discussing this subject (see the Smithsonian article on the historical Free State of Jones) to deny its reality, to reassure racist Southerners that Newt Knight, Jasper Collins and Will Sumrall were traitors and all Southerners, planters and yeomen alike, fought to preserve the rich planter class’ way of life.
Free State of Jones shows the brutality and the reality of life for impoverished white Southerners during the Civil War as no film ever has, and also showed maroons and later freedmen who dared to stand and fight despite overwhelming odds. Odds which were also loaded against the whole of the Knight Company.
African Americans (like women of all colors) have been deprived for most of history of agency: both groups dependent on the good (or too often, ill) will of white men and subjugated by them. This is a (despicable, but unavoidable) historical reality. To try to paint it otherwise is to be divorced from the past reality which lingers in the present to such a great degree. And which Trump is openly flaunting to gain votes (see his son’s comments on the Confederate flag this week).
If you’re referring to the Southeastern.edu link, I don’t see how that — or anything you say that follows — has anything to do with me suggesting that Ross “exaggerated” anything.
Hilarious. Because I’m tried of white saviors, I’m a neo-Confederate who is denying reality? Unbelievable.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have their stories that can be told.
I suggest you reread my review. You clearly missed the point of it entirely, and instead chose to go off a tangent that has nothing to do with my criticisms of this movie.
Okay, the writer doesn’t like the “white savior” stories in the movies. Here is my suggestion and I encourage everyone to say this instead of complaining about it: If you want to hear the stories of George Washington Williams, then tell his story…the fact he is a character in a movie called the Legend of Tarzan can be used to make us more curious about the character and lead to a story about him….I had never heard of him til now. Nor had I heard of the United States of Jones. Tell the truth of those stories and draw out the characters who exemplify black heroism in history, but stop flogging this “white savior” thing to death. I am really pretty sick of it…
MaryAnn isn’t a producer or a film director. She’s a critic. It’s her job to point out that producers and film directors have made far too many movies about “white saviors.” While some of those movies may, individually, be terrific, the trope has long since become a tiresome cliché.
If you’re sick of reading complaints about “white saviors,” some of us are just as sick of seeing movies about them. We would love it if people made movies about black saviors instead. In fact, MaryAnn went out of her way to request exactly that. She even provided a link to a video about Harriet Tubman.
Also, we’d love it if the movies about “white saviors” weren’t as lousy as Tarzan and Free State of Jones.
Then this would be a call for black artists to tell these stories then, wouldn’t it….
It’s a call for studios to support the artists who are already trying to make those films.
Well, you are the movie goer….don’t go to movies you feel don’t tell the story you want to hear. Write to studios or post on studio websites the sort of stories you want to pay money to see, write to movie makers you like watching and suggest stories you would like to be made into movies. Complaining does nothing…all it does is complain…proactively talking to people, companies, artists, whoever gets more done and get you what you want to spend your money on. Believe me, everyone’s money is green, regardless of the pocket it comes from…
If that’s the standard you’re following, then you should write your own movie reviews and support critics who enjoyed these two movies, rather than complain about MaryAnn’s review.
You know, people are always saying, “vote with your dollars.” The problem is, we can’t vote for movies that aren’t being MADE. I’ve been to see the new Ghostbusters three times, not just because I loved it (I did), but because it’s the first opportunity I’ve *had* in a very long time to let my wallet show that I want movies that are just like the movies made about men, but with women in the lead.
Also, complaining *can* accomplish quite a lot. If people just stay away from a movie, the powers that be have no idea *why.* Silence is impossible to read. If enough people explain *why* they’re staying away, maybe the message will get through. And for some of us, complaining and organizing complaint into groups is the only power to effect change that we really have.
Bingo.
Yes. It’s just that easy. Black artists, get on it! Just ignore all the obstacles Hollywood throws in your path.
Sure it is that easy actually.
Funny how white men don’t have to make their own movies to get their stories told. Funny, that.
And you still haven’t.
How difficult life must be for you.
Actually you don’t know me personally so shag off
And you are gone.
>I’m biast: Nothing
G’on. Pull the other one.
Meaning what?
And after the Congo freed itself from Belgium, the First and the Second Congo Wars killed about 5 million. Colonialism was heinous; tribalism, worse.
MaryAnn Johanson: I highly recommend an essay by Adolph Reed, “The Trouble with Uplift,” in the current (Sept/Oct) issue of The Baffler. Reed, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a brilliant analysis of the “white savior” charge and the way it is sometimes used in knee-jerk fashion to dismiss movies that offer historically accurate and moving depictions of blacks, whites, and biracial characters working in solidarity for freedom.
“The Free State of Jones” is a brilliant movie and “perhaps” (as Reed says) “the only filmic representation ever of freedpeople’s self-organization via the Union League — a key chapter in early Southern post-bellum efforts to create an anti-planter coalition of biracial workers’ parties” that “‘white savior’ dismissals telllingly overlook.”
Reed writes: “the only way to narrate the story without Knight as the central dramatis persona would be to abandon historical accuracy.”
BS. The central dramatis persona is always a storytelling CHOICE, not an inevitability of the universe, and it always reveals the biases and blind spots of the storyteller. As MaryAnn notes, historical accuracy is one thing, the choice of how to FRAME that history is another. There’s no reason that “the only filmic representation ever of freedpeople’s self-organization” can’t be told from the vantage point of the freedpeople themselves.
Oh, does NOT write that, does he? Jesus Christ.
Yep. :-/
A movie that wants to be actually described thusly needs to center nonwhite characters, at a minimum, AT LEAST as much as it centers white characters.
I disagree. Obviously.
That is is the only such filmic representation is damning of Hollywood (and of our culture at large). It’s still one that does not put those freedpeople at its center.
Oh, it’s finally happening. (Yay!) And with Cynthia Erivo and Leslie Odom Jr, no less.
My one complaint with Hollywood’s use of gobsmackingly good Broadway singers in non-singing roles is that, well, they won’t sing. Oh well — time for me to listen to the Color Purple and Hamilton soundtracks again.
We must keep our fingers crossed for that one.
Leaving these here just for awesomeness. :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k2xzQyT2bk&t=172s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9AyO8h2I0k