Some belated thoughts on Gods and Generals

I noted last February that for most of its critics, Ron Maxwell’s Civil War extravaganza, Gods and Generals, was a love or hate experience. Now that I’ve finally seen the movie, on DVD, I find myself in the latter camp—regretfully so, since Maxwell’s earlier Civil War movie, Gettysburg, was good in so many ways, particularly in its excellent recreation of the battle on Little Round Top. I grant that Gods and Generals has some decent parts, particularly the battle of Chancellorsville. But overall, and with no intent to offend those who liked this movie, I must say that it is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen—dreadfully written, dreadfully directed, dreadfully edited, and, in the case of its main character, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, embarrassingly acted. The suggestion by some on the paleocon right that the critics of this movie disliked it only because of its pro-Confederacy theme or its positive portrayal of nineteenth century white men, is itself an example of the ideologically driven thinking that the paleocons deplore in others. No, Gods and Generals is a bad movie, not because of its fulsome admiration for the secessionist cause (though there are certainly problematic things to be noted on that score), but because it’s a bad movie, a movie that feels less like a feature film than one of those dramatized historical documentaries they used to show us in high school, though far more onerous to watch.

Here are some of the things that I found wrong with it:

• The dramatic scenes consist of one unbearably slow and sanctimonious speech after another. Defenders of the movie say this is the way nineteenth century Americans spoke to each other. I don’t buy it. The endless Bible-quoting, poetry-quoting conversations do not have a feel of either historical or dramatic truth, they just seem like a reduction of character to sanctimonious gesture. (Indeed, in the stiltedness of its dialog and acting, Gods and Generals reminded me of Otto Preminger’s 1961 movie Exodus, in which Preminger was evidently so awed by the elevated moral theme of the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel that he abandoned his usual jaundiced eye and sharp observations and turned his characters into pious mannequins.)

• The opening forty minutes presents a neo-Confederate’s dream version of the Southern secession. All we hear is self-serving Southern propaganda that sounds like it came right from lewrockwell.com. No historical context is given. The firing on Fort Sumter, the immediate cause of the war, is not mentioned. Virginia is shown as seceding purely because of Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops, whereas Virginia’s move toward secession began with the firing on Fort Sumter, before Lincoln’s calling of troops.

• Despite the heavy overlay of secessionist sloganeering, the secessionist cause per se is not the central subject of the movie; indeed the movie’s chief problem is that it has neither a discernible central subject nor a coherent narrative line. For example, the account of the war begins with the first battle of Mannassas, in July 1861, but then it unaccountably skips forward to the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, giving the viewer no idea of the huge events that have transpired in between. The battle of Antietam, on September 17, 1862, the most violent single day in American history and a strategic defeat for the South, isn’t even mentioned. The basic shape of the Civil War, or even any passing reference to the overall course of the war, is absent from this movie, leaving it without a historical structure. The upshot is that whatever historically informative qualities Gods and Generals possesses is purely on the small scale.

• The movie does have a main character, Stonewall Jackson, yet it skips over the military exploits that made his reputation as a great general, particularly his incredible achievements in the Shenandoah campaign. And it devotes much time to the battle of Fredericksburg where the focus is not on Jackson at all.

• Jackson is portrayed by Steven Lang as a deeply pious man, a preacher as much as a soldier. But Lang gives no sense of what must have been Jackson’s exceptional aggressiveness and intensity. Lang’s disconcertingly large, wide face (made even larger by a huge and obviously fake beard), his langorous speech and sentimental mannerisms seem completely wrong for the lean-faced, hawk-eyed Jackson that we know from Civil War photographs. Jackson’s slogan, the movie tells us, was “speed and secrecy.” Yet Lang’s Jackson is an insufferably slow and sententious fellow. We’re never given a hint of the historic Jackson who drove his troops with unprecedented swiftness for long distances up and down the Shenandoah Valley, repeatedly stunning the Union army.

• Robert Duvall as Robert E. Lee is too old and plebeian.

• Jeff Daniels, who was excellent as Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in Maxwell’s 1993 Gettysburg, reprises the same part here, but is now overweight and middle-aged, completely wrong for the idealistic young college professor. Also, there’s no apparent reason why Chamberlain and his regiment should be the dramatic focus of the assault on Marye’s Heights at the battle of Fredericksburg.

• In a major directorial lapse, Chamberlain’s men are shown as pointing upward in consternation at the Confederate gun emplacements on the Marye’s Heights above them, but then they proceed to walk along a large flat field, firing their guns straight before them, rather than upward. When the camera switches to the Confederates shooting from behind their stone wall, they are also aiming their weapons horizontally, rather than downward. I’ve been to the Fredericksburg battlefield, and the movie gives no sense of that vast slope above Fredericksburg that the Union army insanely sought to take.

• As a further example of the movie’s substandard editing and continuity, after the Union forces endure withering Confederate fire as they move forward toward Marye’s Heights, a Union officer suddenly calls for retreat. But we’re given no sense of why retreat is called for at that particular moment. It bears no relationship to the action that immediately proceeded it, and seems entirely arbitrary.

• Many of the re-enactors who play the Union and Southern troop are, frankly, rather porky men in their thirties and forties, nothing like the thin-as-rail soldiers familiar from Civil War photographs. As I watched the battle of Chancellorsville, famous for the astonishing alacrity with which Jackson’s corps marched 12 miles through forests and surprised the flank of the Union army, it was risible to see Jackson’s overweight men charging forward, their fat midsections bulging. In short, Maxwell has cast overfed contemporary American men as Civil War soldiers. Given his commitment to authenticity, would it have been too much to ask his re-enactors to lose a bit of weight before filming began? Or perhaps to have put the heavier men further back in the ranks away from the camera, and find some slimmer re-enactors (assuming there were any) for the front rank?

In the DVD’s commentary section, Maxwell inadvertently provides the key to why he went so wrong with this movie. He says he made it with two ideas in mind: to be as historically accurate as possible, and (he’s not embarrassed to inform us) to make a Homeric-style epic. It seems that these two Big Ideas, combined with the overwhelming sense of piety that he felt toward and sought to convey in his characters, crushed any artistic feel or any sense of imagination he may have had as a storyteller and director. Personally I care much less about absolute historical exactitude of interior furnishings and soldiers’ equipment than about seeing a movie that tells a cogent and dramatic story conveying the essential truth of the characters, whether they are fictional or historical, and so draws me into a created world. (Of course, the ideal for a historical or a period-based fictional picture is to combine period accuracy with an atmosphere that feels true to the time and the story, as in the first two Godfather movies.) So, notwithstanding Gods and Generals’ accuracy on fine points, the basic problem remains. The lack of an overall historical or narrative framework, the fragmentary manner in which the issues and events of the Civil War are presented, results in a film that does not even feel historically informative, except in the purely micro sense of our seeing, for example, the extraordinary charge of Jackson’s corps at Chancellorsville as they roll up the Union flank, or hearing Jackson’s last words on his deathbed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 28, 2003 07:16 PM | Send