Matewan

Nearly a decade ago, soon after the success of his wonderful debut film The Return of the Secaucus Seven, John Sayles wrote a screenplay based on a historical event known as the “Matewan Massacre,” in which a considerable amount of blood was spilled during a miners’ strike in West Virginia in 1920.

You can see how Hollywood producers looking for the next Star Wars would be wary of such a project, and Sayles had some trouble getting his pet screenplay off the ground. But he kept after it, though his resourcefulness was tested when funding fell through at one point and he scurried to assemble a low-budget film with the available funds (The Brother from Another Planet).

But finally Sayles completed Matewan. It’s still a relatively low-budget production, costing just under $4 million, but Sayles has characteristically gotten more than his money’s worth in production design and cinematography.

In fact, Matewan is one of the most physically beautiful movies of the year. Filming in the West Virginia backwoods, Sayles and cinematographer Haskell Wexler find a gorgeous photographic byplay in the trees, the earth, and especially the one-street town. And yet, due to the often bitter nature of the subject matter, the film is never merely “pretty.”

The town of Matewan in 1920 is under the thumb of the mining company, which has brought in immigrant and black labor to drive down wages. When local miners squawk, or threaten to strike, the coal company merely imports more cheap workers.

A union organizer (Chris Cooper) arrives in town to bring the workers together. The company responds by sending two goons (Kevin Tighe, Gordon Clapp) to settle things down, by force if necessary. Meanwhile, the independent-minded police chief (David Strathairn) and mayor (Josh Mostel) are trying to hold the lid on this pressure cooker.

Eventually, all three groups of workers – the locals, immigrants, and blacks – join in a strike. The company’s hard-line reaction leads to a showdown on the town’s main street, one sunny, bloody day.

That showdown may sound a bit like the climax of a traditional Western, and Sayles invokes that form more than once. And Matewan is also like many Westerns in one crucial, compromising way: The characters in this drama are drawn in black-and-white terms. The company men are wholly contemptible thugs. The union men, despite their differences, are never less than right.

The simplicity of this design keeps the movie from achieving real greatness. As it is, Sayles has still woven some fascinating episodes into a rich whole. Entire sequences stand out, such as the thrilling section in which Cooper is falsely fingered as a company spy, which almost leads to him being killed by a fellow striker (James Earl Jones, the only star in the cast).

Sayles, who works outside of the studio system, continues to be one of the brightest hopes for the future of the American cinema. Or, if that sounds too hifalutin’, he simply makes intelligent and ambitious movies like nobody else. Another long-cherished project, his screenplay about the 1919 Chicago Black Sox baseball scandal, is scheduled to be filmed later this year. That story, which contains more moral ambiguity than Matewan, could confirm his place at the head of the American class.

First published in The Herald, September 27, 1987

I’m not sure why I was looking for ambiguity here; as the words of the union song have it, “Which side are you on?” seems simple enough as an approach to union-busting thugs. This is an excellent film, clearly an important one for Sayles, and of course it introduced Chris Cooper to the movies. Mary McDonnell and Will Oldham are also in the cast. Wexler’s photography should be a basic text for how to make a low-budget film look gorgeous.