MATEWAN (82)

Directed by: John Sayles (1987)

Starring: Chris Cooper, Will Oldham, James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell

The Pitch: West Virginia, the 1920s : tensions between coal-miners and mine-owners come to a head in the little town of Matewan.

Theo Sez: Haven't seen this since the late 80s, during which time I've gone from being a Sayles fan to being fairly unenthusiastic about his work - so it's a shock to find how fine it remains, one of the least-appreciated great films of the 80s in fact. Maybe it's because Sayles' rather metronomic rhythm fits the placid pace of life in a small town, though equally because the threat of violence always hangs behind it - it throbs with a passion he seems never to have found (or even tried for) again. Just about everything works, even the decision to polarise the characters by making the Company thugs out-and-out evil (it's like an anchor, a vantage-point from which we can observe the gradations of humanity in everybody else) - and, if it seems old-fashioned and predictable (a Western, an epic, a moral tract), it's also teeming with grace-notes, never quite siding with anyone, finally suggesting that ideology is doomed to founder on the rocks of human nature. It uses old-fashioned elements, building terrific tension with a D.W.Griffith-style, will-he-get-there-in-time? cross-cutting sequence then sloughing it off as a red herring, resolving the tension in a subtler way. Hard to forget the muddy-milky look or uniformly first-rate performances (only Sayles himself hams it up) - David Strathairn as the shy, brave sheriff giving an involuntary chuckle after "They've come to kill me" (he seems proud of it more than anything else), or the look of puzzlement melting into a broad grin on Jones' face as he realises his so-called enemy just cracked a joke. It's such a full, rich, panoramic movie ; it reverberates in your head for days afterwards. [[Note to the anally-retentive : this is a 1987 film, but you'll find it on my Top Ten list for 1986 - a mistake I've decided not to correct. Thing is, 1987 is so chock-full of favourite films that, much as I love MATEWAN, I couldn't really give it anything above #5, whereas it's easily the #3 film for 1986, challenging for the #2 - and, since I'd like more people to see this film, I want it to stand out as much as possible. Plus I guess it was shot in 1986, and the all-important script was written in 1986, so you could sort of say it's a 1986 movie, sort of. Anyway, there it is. If you had a website of your own, you'd understand...]] [July 2019: This blatant sophistry has now been corrected.]