• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

NANCY METTE

JOHN SAYLES

JACE ALEXANDER

KEN JENKINS

I could easily fill a number of spots in this book with the work of John Sayles, one of the most independent of independent filmmakers. Already established as a fiction writer of considerable skill, he hit a bull’s-eye with his first attempt at filmmaking, Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980). Funding his efforts, in part, by writing (and polishing) mainstream Hollywood movies, he has never compromised his ideals. That doesn’t mean every movie he makes is great, but each one aspires to tell a good story and bring interesting, multifaceted characters to the screen. His ear for dialogue is extraordinary; so is his eye for casting the right actor in each part. Such eminent actors as David Strathairn and Chris Cooper have emerged from Sayles’s stock company of performers. (A good actor himself, he often appears in his own films, in small roles, and has appeared in other directors’ movies, as well. He’s wickedly funny as a self-indulgent director in Bertrand Tavernier’s In the Electric Mist.)

Sayles is unapologetically liberal, but he usually avoids polemics in his screenplays. That’s one reason Matewan is so effective. The story of a labor struggle in rural West Virginia in the 1920s, it could have dissolved into a series of button-pushing Hollywood clichés. Not here. The good guys and bad guys are clearly defined, but the story has many facets, and no one understands that better than Sayles.

The setting is a poor Appalachian community (pronounced MATE-wan, not Mat-e-wan) where the Stone Mountain Coal Company controls the lives of its residents. With a recent reduction in wages, there have been rumblings of unionism and that won’t be tolerated. The company has already integrated Italian immigrants into the community to break the spirit of the locals; now it’s trainloads of blacks who are supposed to quell the idea of opposing the bosses (not that they’ve been warned of the situation ahead of time).

Chris Cooper plays a labor organizer who arrives in Matewan with a mission, fully aware of the powder keg that rests under his feet. He must pacify the various factions and keep them from fighting each other so they can focus their energies on the ultimate goal: speaking with one voice and standing against the bosses.

The dramatis personae of the story range from a teenage preacher (Will Oldham) to a prostitute (Nancy Mette) who took up her profession after her husband died in the mines. There are solid performances from James Earl Jones, as one of the black workers who listens to Cooper with an open mind; Mary McDonnell, as a widow who works as hard as any of the men in town; David Strathairn, as the local police chief; and Josh Mostel, as the mayor. Sayles gives himself a showcase scene as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and his longtime partner and producer Maggie Renzi is quite effective as one of the Italian women who views her lot in life without an ounce of sentiment.

Matewan gives us a strong sense of time and place. (Sayles even wrote some bogus labor songs for his workers to chant.) Haskell Wexler’s vivid, black-and-white cinematography adds to the grittiness of the milieu. But it’s Sayles’s clear-eyed vision that makes this movie so memorable.

84. MAYBE BABY

(2000)

Directed by Ben Elton

Screenplay by Ben Elton

Based on the novel Inconceivable by Ben Elton

Actors:

HUGH LAURIE

JOELY RICHARDSON

ADRIAN LESTER

JAMES PUREFOY

TOM HOLLANDER

JOANNA LUMLEY

ROWAN ATKINSON

MATTHEW MACFADYEN

DAWN FRENCH

EMMA THOMPSON

RACHAEL STIRLING

The ascension of Hugh Laurie to full-fledged American TV stardom on House must have amused his loyal fans—and possibly even the actor himself—given his long and prominent career on British television (in such series as Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster, and A Bit of Fry and Laurie), not to mention the fine work he’s done on screen in such movies as Peter’s Friends, Sense and Sensibility, The Borrowers, and Stuart Little. There is also a certain irony in watching this multitalented performer break through in a dramatic