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Jan 24, 2020 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Released in 1987, John Sayles’ Matewan is a dramatized chronicle of the events leading into the Battle of Matewan, the bursting point of a 1920 labor strike in one of West Virginia’s poorest coal mining regions. It’s one of the most tense films we’ve ever seen.

The film begins shortly before the arrival of union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper), sent to the town of Matewan to rally the striking workers, deter them from violently striking out at the Stone Mountain Coal Company and their scabs, and to prevent them from turning on one another during a long haul holdout. He’s first taken in at the boarding house run by a miner’s widow (Mary McDonnell) and her teenage son (Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) before he’s ousted into a tent village that the striking miners must hastily erect once they’re evicted from company housing.

Hired by the Company to essentially break the strikers’ will by any means necessary, two strongmen from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency (Kevin Tighe and Gordon Clapp) make their way into Matewan like a virus. They intimidate the workers, using violence and spreading rumors to bring the starving workers to the point of snapping, and turning against each other or worse, attacking the Company’s holdings or scabs, which would bring in military support from the state to squash the strike. Next to Kenehan, the only men willing to stand between the detectives’ threats and the desperate coal miners are Matewan’s sheriff (David Strathairn) and mayor (Josh Mostel), who feel a civic duty to their people that could very well cost them their lives.

“I think all God plans is that we get born, and we got to take it from there.”

A story of good versus evil of almost Biblical proportions, Matewan is ruled by its performances. As the lead Baldwin-Felts agents, Tighe and Clapp move into town like two of Revelations’ four horsemen. In a movie where the rest of the characters must grapple between short and long-term gains, the good of their families or the good of the union, these two men are undiluted evil. They sneer at the good guys’ poorness, laugh at their religion, or do anything else they can to make our striking heroes feel like less than human beings. By making the villains so worthy of the audience’s hate, and nailing home the knowledge that they can hurt the miners, but the miners absolutely cannot hurt them back, instills so much of the movie with an overwhelming sense of helplessness. There have been many great movie villains, but few have succeeded in making the viewers feel as powerless as their on-screen surrogates as these ones do.

Beyond the stark, blackened evil of the two Baldwin-Felts agents, much of the cast is far greyer in their stances. Kenehan, the de facto “hero” of the movie, is immensely fallible. He believes in his cause, but is painfully aware that they’re essentially using these people to achieve it, not far off from the way in which the Company saw the miners as nothing more than equipment. The miners themselves have themselves to look out for, even as desperate times call for them tossing aside the values they’ve adhered to most. Few Clothes, a Black miner played by James Earl Jones and a pacifist, ponders murders for his union brothers. Even Will Oldham’s young coal miner and aspiring preacher, Danny, seems to lose his faith as the strike bears on.

Shot on location in the ghost town of Thurmond, West Virginia – a haunting locale, for anyone who’s visited – the movie justifiably received an Oscar nod for its cinematography by the late, great Haskell Wexler. The music, by longtime Sayles collaborator Mason Daring and featuring vocals by bluegrass singer Hazel Dickens, does an excellent job of setting the film’s time and place. The film both looks and sounds impressive in its new 4K restoration paired with an uncompressed soundtrack. Bonus materials on Criterion’s highly-recommended Blu-ray include several all-new documentaries featuring the movie’s cast and crew, a short feature on the impact filming had on its local West Virginia surroundings, and a director’s audio commentary imported from an older release. A riveting piece of Americana, Matewan makes our list of essential viewing.

https://www.criterion.com/films/29461-matewan