Also this issue:

Lost and Found
A documentary about Terry Gilliam's failure spells success for its creators -- and maybe for Gilliam as well.
-Sam Adams

Cops and Bobbles
Dark Blue drops the ball.
-Cindy Fuchs

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

February 20-26, 2003

movies

Get Your War On

Civil suits: Stephen Lang (left) and Robert Duvall in costumes of epic proportions.

How to lose a Civil War cinephile in 210 minutes.

by Ryan Godfrey

It's always a bad sign when a film begins with an epigraph from George Eliot. Admittedly, I can't think of any other examples of this immutable law of cinema, but a quotation from the author of 900-page exercises in indulgent, politely anguished costume drama is definitely not what you want to see at the start of a three-and-a-half-hour Civil War movie like Ronald F. Maxwell's Gods and Generals. As the opening credits roll and the initial salvos in the impending onslaught of French horns and strings are fired, Eliot's invocation ends, "The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead."

Meant, I suppose, to cast Maxwell's story of the first two years of the War Between the States as a tale of simple men fighting for their notions of home, the quote also foreshadows the serious amount of screen time to be devoted to wistful stargazing and heavenward philosophizing. As a rule of thumb, the more elaborate a character's facial hair, the more important his role, and the more sky ogling and speechifying he gets to do.

Central to the narrative is Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang), one of the Confederacy's great tacticians and leaders of men. In this cinematic manifestation, he's also a loving husband, a humble god-fearer and proud owner of the fakest, most distracting, most fabulous beard since Heston parted the Red Sea.

Somewhat more manageable whiskers are stuck onto the faces of Robert Duvall and Jeff Daniels, who round out the central characters as Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and Union Lt. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Duvall makes a nifty, believable Lee (they're actually distant relations); his measured, droll Virginian is a vast improvement over Martin Sheen's soft performance in the same role in Maxwell's otherwise far superior Gettysburg.

While Gods and Generals is a half-hour shorter than 1993's Gettysburg (both use amateur re-enactors for the fighting scenes and were produced by Ted Turner, who reprises his unintentionally funny cameo as a Southern general), it feels sloppier and more aimless. For one thing, instead of focusing on the intricacies of one seminal three-day battle, Maxwell and co. have expanded the scope to recount all the major events from the beginning of the war to just before the Southern army marches into that fateful Pennsylvania town. The result is ill-conceived and punchless skirmish footage -- Manassas looks like Fredericksburg looks like Chancellorsville, and you have to be told who won after the fighting subsides -- punctuated by long stretches of the aforementioned dreary speeches about God and mothers and brothers and freedom and home. Yep, home is pretty great: It's where Civil War movie buffs should be, watching Gettysburg one more time.