PC Washington Post Bashes ‘Free State’: ‘Wrong Time’ for ‘White’ Tale

June 25th, 2016 3:00 PM

The Washington Post on Friday railed with politically correct anger at the new Civil War-era film Free State of Jones. According to a headline for the Ann Hornaday  (print) review, it’s the “wrong time for a white Knight’s tale.” The true story centers around Netwon Knight, a Missippian who wages war against he Confederacy and the slave-holding class. 

Hornaday whines, “In interviews, [director Gary] Ross has insisted that he didn’t want ‘Free State of Jones’ to become another white savior movie, but that’s precisely what it is, especially during scenes when the murderous injustice of slavery is refracted through Knight’s frustrated tears.” 

She continued: 

Again, this is where Ross, who wrote the script from a story by Leonard Hartman, might have made an enormous difference with just a slight tweak, reframing the narrative to focus more on Knight’s alliance with a former slave named Moses (a composite character, played in a breakout performance by Mahershala Ali), or his relationships with Serena and Rachel, which according to the historical record were vexingly complex, and grew more so as time wore on.

The film critic whined that presenting Knight as a heroic figure who fought slavery is “simplistic,” a story "that seems simplistic and self-congratulatory in a cinematic era defined by '12 Years a Slave' and 'Selma' on the one hand, and Nate Parker’s upcoming 'The Birth of a Nation' on the other." 

For all the focus on race, Hornaday only allows a sentence on what she sees as the movie's "Marxist theories.” 

Knight is a captivating figure, and Ross makes sure that his ideas — borne of his primitive Baptist upbringing, but of a piece with emerging Marxist theories — resonate with unmistakable prescience.

Over in the New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott described slavery this way: "It is obvious to Newton, and certainly to Moses, that the Glorious Cause of the Confederacy was a rapacious and exploitative cotton-based capitalist economy..."

Actually, slavery was quite the opposite of capitalism. By forcing them into involuntary servitude, it robbed men and women of the fruit of the labor. That’s not capitalism at all. But it’s typical from liberals at the New York Times and the Washington Post.