KEEPING UP WITH JONES IS A CHORE

LIKE Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, Free State Of Jones takes us back and forth in time but so long-windedly, at two hours and 20 minutes, that one’s fascination with the basic story — a true, little-known episode during and just after the U.S. Civil War — peters out into a series of heavy sighs and surreptitious timechecks. Rarely have I so wanted a film to finish, with so little evidence that it was about to oblige.

Matthew McConaughey plays Newton Knight, a Mississippi farmer who was a medic on the Confederate side, but deserted rather than fight for the vested interests of rich plantation owners.

Instead, he holed up in a Jones County swamp with a self-styled militia of fellow rebels and renegade slaves, and declared the county an independent state, with allegiance to neither North nor South. Later, he settled down with former slave Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and fathered a second family.

It’s a cracking story which writer-director

Free State Of Jones (15) Verdict: Tendentious history lesson

Gary Ross systematically undermines, by making his film far too much of a noble history lesson. And when the drama doesn’t tell it to his satisfaction, he resorts to captions. In case they don’t do the trick, either, he flashes forward to 1940, when old Newt Knight’s great-grandson, for the crime of being one-eighth black, was put on trial for marrying a white woman. Emancipation made precious few inroads into endemic racism, you see.

McConaughey does his best through all this, effectively playing Newt as an 1860s Robin Hood and gamely sporting a set of teeth to give his orthodontist nightmares. But all Newt’s victorious on-screen battles count for nothing, alongside the losing one he fights for the sustained interest of the audience.