JOHN SAYLES breaks big ground with “Matewan,” a fictional story of coal mining and union busting in West Virginia. Swathed in the stylized trappings and pioneer themes of such “classic” models as “The Godfather” and “Once Upon a Time in America,” it tells of a different American dream — of the employed and exploited. Add uniformly good acting to Sayles’ script of dark coal pits, West Virginia spirit and cowboyish melodrama and you have stirring cinema.
Matewan
Cast: Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones, Mary MacDonnell, Will Oldham
Showtimes
May 1:5:00 pm, 7:30 pm“Matewan,” based on events preceding the 1920 West Virginia Mine War, paints the struggle among the Stone Mountain Coal Company, its miners and a union organizer as a kind of “The Good, the Bad and the Wobbly.” Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) is a former Industrial Worker of the World (they were known as “wobblies”) who pulls into Matewan town, a place where the company owns everything. “You ain’t with the Company,” Kennehan’s new landlady Elma tells him, “there ain’t no work.” Stone Mountain has also infuriated the locals by recruiting southern blacks and immigrant Italians to keep labor cheap.
Kenehan has his work cut out for him. He must unite disparate groups into strikers and, when the company forces them into a tent camp in the mountains, keep some very desperate people calm. And this company has not only firepower but eyes and ears in unexpected places. – The Washington Post
