Matewan: All We Got in Common
Matewan opens in the pitch-black darkness of a West Virginia coal mine. A miner lights the carbide lamp on his helmet. The small open flame he wears provides the only flicker of light in this cramped space next to a coal seam. A couple of minutes later, the miner yells out, “Shootin’ coal! Shootin’ coal!” and soon enough, an explosion goes off.
With this version of “Action!” that we see and hear on-screen, John Sayles brings his 1987 movie out of the darkness and starts it with a bang, as if he has simultaneously rolled camera on the scene he is filming and flipped the switch on the projector showing it. Right away, he gives the film over to one of its workers, a gesture from a writer-director more interested in the drama of history than in movie stars. We realize only later that this man is Sephus Purcell (Ken Jenkins), unofficial leader of the native-born Matewan miners.
In Sayles’s book Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie “Matewan,” which was released concurrently with the film and is perhaps the best (or only?) how-to memoir by a director about a single one of his works, he mentions that the miners’ carbide headlamps, though difficult to photograph, were important to the film; they had often provided the only light in the actual West Virginia mines where he and his cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, were shooting—just “a few foot-candles’ worth of illumination.” That was all the light the miners had had during the long hours of grueling labor in the tight, low spaces of the coal seams. Wexler created a palette for the film that emphasizes diffused blacks, browns, and gray-blues. He and Sayles eliminated primary colors to better convey the feeling of lives “spent crawling in coal” in work clothes that had been through “a thousand washings in harsh lye soap,” as Sayles writes.
The Battle of Matewan, also known as the Matewan Massacre, took place in 1920, in “Bloody” Mingo County, West Virginia, home of the Hatfield family, who had feuded with the McCoys in the previous century. Sid Hatfield was the chief of police in Matewan at the time of the massacre, the rare lawman who refused to be bought off by the coal companies. He sided with the miners, many of whom had recently joined the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), against the “gun thugs” of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, brought in by the Stone Mountain Coal Company to break the union by threatening or murdering its members and harassing their families, as well as to ensure at gunpoint that scab labor brought in from out-of-state black and Italian communities would work longer hours for less money than the striking miners.
By 1987, Sayles had made four films, one of which, The Brother from Another Planet (1984), had been started, finished, and released during the lengthy process of trying to produce Matewan. Used to working on low-budget, independent films, Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi eventually raised nearly $4 million to make Matewan. They filmed in Thurmond, West Virginia, over a seven-week period in autumn 1986. Sayles’s early movies look prescient two decades into the twenty-first century. Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979), a comedy-drama, deals with baby boomer friends who remain true to their youthful ideals but must face the failure of their generation to change the world. Lianna (1983) is an explicitly feminist film, a drama in which a woman who has married her college professor leaves him for another woman, also a professor. The socioeconomic gap between these lovers ultimately separates them, as it does Rosanna Arquette’s college girl and her working-class boyfriend (Vincent Spano) in Baby It’s You, also released in 1983.
Almost unique among movies from the first half of the eighties, The Brother from Another Planet deals with immigration, racism, and slavery. In it, we experience Reagan-era social reality through the eyes of the mute main character (Joe Morton), who appears to be an ordinary black man but is really an alien from outer space. His pursuit by “men in black” (played by David Strathairn and the director himself) is a reminder that Sayles’s working-class dramas influenced Hollywood and were repurposed in unexpected ways. Secaucus 7, with its ensemble cast gathered for a weekend, bears a resemblance to The Big Chill, made four years later, just as Brother now can’t help but remind viewers of the Men in Black franchise that began in 1997.
“No other writer-director who began making his own films post–Star Wars has managed to achieve as much while staying as true to his ideals.”
Sayles’s earlier films had had some success, but when he, Renzi, and coproducer Peggy Rajski began work on Matewan, the feature-film landscape did not favor what the director calls in his book a “semi-epic period piece” in which “the story was political, the hero a socialist, the ending not upbeat, and there was no room . . . for a rock soundtrack.” The distributor Cinecom kicked in a big percentage of the budget to get the film made, and ultimately it was Matewan that established Sayles as a writer-director of leftist Americana and working-class crime drama (though one who has also made the occasional foray abroad, setting films in Ireland, Mexico, and the Philippines).
Sayles followed Matewan with Eight Men Out (1988), a baseball drama starring John Cusack, about the 1919 Black Sox scandal and the unfair labor practices in the major leagues at the end of the dead-ball era. Since then, Sayles, nearly always with Renzi producing (she has done so on fourteen of his eighteen total features), has made a dozen more movies, each one furthering their commitment to political filmmaking in narrative features. His career is unique in American cinema. No other writer-director who began making his own films post–Star Wars has managed to achieve as much while staying as true to his ideals.
Sheriff Hatfield—whom Strathairn, in his third Sayles film, plays with an inscrutable agenda—is not the hero of Matewan. It has two: Chris Cooper’s Joe Kenehan, an outside agitator and pacifist sent in by the UMWA, and Will Oldham’s teenage preacher-miner, Danny. They are the film’s twin conscience and heart. Danny narrates the film as an old man, a survivor of the massacre. J. K. “Kent” Lilly, a Mercer County, West Virginia, native, provides Danny’s present-day voice in the real accent of the mines and hollers. This triple focus in Matewan, in which Danny looks back at his younger self while that self watches Joe organize the miners and oppose the company, allows Sayles to build a kind of quiet, unshowy heroism into the film’s structure. Matewan is the story of Danny’s radicalization as it emerges not just from the violence around him but also from his first exposure to ideas from outside his small community.
Cooper was making his film debut at age thirty-five and has the thin face of a silent-movie star here; it is clear why he has become a Sayles regular. He plays Joe, a former Wobbly and an ex-con, with quiet dignity and friendly stoicism. Oldham, sixteen at the time and a native of nearby Louisville, Kentucky, had appeared in one other movie but had not yet recorded any of the music he would become known for. His surprising authenticity in Matewan is feral but thoughtful, grounded in the Bible stories his character knows so well. Danny must come to the decision to reject the “hardshell” antiunion, antisocialist dogma of the preacher he has grown up admiring (played by Sayles, looking like a twisted Gregory Peck, as a mean-spirited shouter) so that he can reconcile the principles of the union with his Christian beliefs. We can see in Oldham’s eyes the change taking place in his character when the beefy, red-faced Hickey (Kevin Tighe), the main Baldwin-Felts thug, insults him at the dinner table in the boardinghouse run by his mother, Elma (Mary McDonnell), a young widow. Hickey calls Danny dumb and describes Matewan as a “shithole,” then pulls a gun on him because he won’t pass the peas. When the boy goes to live in the camp with Joe and the striking miners, he realizes he “ain’t never seen everybody all together like this” before, and his conversion is complete.
Sayles deliberately rejects the kinds of hillbilly portrayals of Appalachians commonly found in American movies, from Sergeant York (1941) to Deliverance (1972). Each character in Matewan gets a moment to show his or her reasons, including Bridey Mae (Nancy Mette). Hickey calls her “that tramp who meets the passenger train,” and C. E. Lively (Bob Gunton) coerces her into lying about Kenehan in order to discredit him. Sayles, however, has already allowed her to tell her own story, near the beginning of the film. Elma, for her part, sees that Kenehan is not telling the truth about himself at first but seals their friendship with a bloody handshake, a portent of the film’s ending and the first in a series of sage, silent decisions she will make about people.
Joe, Danny, Bridey Mae, and Elma are Sayles inventions, but James Earl Jones’s Few Clothes and Gunton’s Lively, like Strathairn’s Sid Hatfield, are not. Few Clothes fought in the Spanish-American War beside Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. As a spokesman for the black miners, he agrees to join the union, which leads to his being enlisted to commit murder. That’s because among the union men there is a traitor and spy working for the coal company. The real-life Lively, posing as a fired miner, owned a restaurant in Matewan where the union men held meetings. The film’s plot turns on Gunton’s portrayal of this snake in the grass, who smears Kenehan and does not shy away from torture and cold-blooded killing. Lively died in West Virginia in 1962 at age seventy-five. He exited this world unpunished and presumably untroubled, unlike villains in movies.
“Matewan has the structure of a western. But, Sayles is careful to point out, ‘the purpose of the story is not nostalgia.’ ”
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