Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.
MATEWAN
Synopsis
West Virginia, 1920. Former Wobbly and pacifist labor unionist Joe Kenehan arrives in the town of Matewan to organize a strike among its hard-pressed coal miners. As local tensions and company skulduggery turn the situation into a powder keg, violent confrontation begins to seem grimly inevitable.
Synopsis
West Virginia, 1920. Former Wobbly and pacifist labor unionist Joe Kenehan arrives in the town of Matewan to organize a strike among its hard-pressed coal miners. As local tensions and company skulduggery turn the situation into a powder keg, violent confrontation begins to seem grimly inevitable.
Our take
John Sayles’s workerist ode to human conscience inverts the period epic to tell history from below, honoring the past with a protest song’s straight-talking moral clarity. Plotted with novelistic expansion, and shot with soot-smeared tactility, Matewan is a high point of American independent cinema.