After a streak of Godard films that left me a little exhausted, I was looking for a big narrative to immerse myself in, a film where artifice does not jump to our attention but is transparent and the world of the film believable. I immediately remembered about John Sayles and his nouvellas of cinema. With Lone Star I bemoaned the lack of a visual imagination, but coming to a Sayles film for a narrative like I did with Matewan, I leave completely satisfied. The man excels in telling us stories with scope and values of importance.
What a lovely world he creates here, among the derelict shacks and cabins of the Pennsylvania foothills of Matewan a moral struggle is fought, flawed characters with faces blackened by coaldust fumble with great ideals and big hopes for a better future, and the one thing that stands between them and justice is their own prejudice. I like how the film suggests that for the collective to be reformed the individual must be reformed first, that we need to look inwards first before we make a stand. The stand in the film is heroic but also desperate, a bit of a lawless old West on the way to emancipation. John Sayles is a leftist and this comes across loud and clear in Matewan, but unlike a Godard film like Week End, Sayles doesn't call for blood, he calls for social justice.
The narrative here sprawls in and out of log cabins where sullen faces plot strikes and discuss ideals, in and out of makeshift tents and muddy town streets where coalminers live and die and sing, now a fiddle or harmonica is calling out from the dark the sad tune of a life of suffering, and the finale is sealed with a shootout filled with tragedy and hope. Sayles' camera doesn't intrude in any of this, rather it's invited in and hankers down out of way to quietly listen or conspire.
Matewan makes a great doublebill with Martin Ritt's The Molly Maguires, another forlorn drama of the oppressed that speaks of moral devastation in the Pennsylvania coal fields, but more, it stands by itself as one of the great American narratives of the 80's.
