February 21, 2003 | At its frequent, literally awesome best, Gettysburg – writer-director Ronald F. Maxwell’s 1993 Civil War epic based on The Killer Angels, the late Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel – recalled Woodrow Wilson’s apt description of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as “history writ with lightning.”
Unfortunately, Maxwell has not been able to make lightning strike twice.
Gods and Generals – a kinda-sorta prequel to Gettysburg, based on a novel by Shaara’s son, Jeffrey M. Shaara – is a stiff and stilted historical pageant that somehow manages to make the savage tumult of thousands pitched against thousands seem not so much dreadful as dreadfully dull.
Clocking in at just over four hours, complete with intermission, it moves with the plodding purposefulness and graceless gait of someone taking a long hike up a steep hill while weighed down with a heavy backpack. One scene follows the next without any sense of narrative momentum. Indeed, there are times when you may feel the movie has come to a complete halt, and might actually start moving in reverse.
Part of the problem is the sheer volume of verbiage. During the more tedious stretches of Gettysburg, an infinitely more compelling drama, Maxwell allowed many of his characters – especially, though not exclusively, highly romanticized historical figures – to speechify too grandiloquently, too self-consciously, for unconscionably long periods. In Gods and Generals, a movie that details the first two years of the Civil War, from early 1861 through 1863, fewer characters get to indulge in flowery oratory. But those who do get to bloviate are inexhaustible blowhards.
The worst offender in this regard is Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the ill-fated Confederate tactician and messianic warrior portrayed by Stephen Lang. With a frightful fervor blazing in his eyes and a thick black beard plastered to his chin, Lang periodically works himself into frenzies of varying intensity. Intentionally or not, he renders Jackson as a zealous crackpot fueled with the fanatical and unshakable certitude of a True Believer.
At one point, Jackson prepares for a tussle with those damned Yankees by gazing heavenward and promising: “It is your sword I will wield in battle, your banner I will raise against those who would desecrate our land.” Later, he justifies the wielding of that terrible swift sword against deserters by announcing: “I regard desertion as a sin against the army of the Lord.” By the time Jackson finally dies – after nearly a half-hour of lachrymose deathbed melodrama – you have every right to expect that St. Peter himself will appear to personally escort the general’s soul to the Great Beyond.
What makes the scenery-chewing more than a little unsettling is Lang’s uncanny resemblance in some close-ups to an al-Queda terrorist. In fact, if you listen closely, you’ll note that all the bellicose talk about smiting the wicked and repulsing the infidels… er, I mean, the invading Federalists… could be lifted from the soundtrack of the latest Osama bin Laden video.
Gen. Jackson gets a distressingly disproportionate amount of screen time in a movie that overall seems disproportionately – if not offensively – sympathetic to the Confederate cause. Gods and Generals begins by blaming Northerners in general, and Abraham Lincoln in particular, for starting the nasty altercations that lead the upright and God-fearing folks of the Deep South to secede from the Union. Gen. Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall, picking up an easy paycheck) agrees to lead the Confederate Army only because of his devotion to the cause of states’ rights. (“Though I love the Union,” he solemnly intones, “I love Virginia more.”) And the slaves? They’re shuffling, selfless lackeys who never allow their vague yearnings for freedom to get in the way of serving their beloved “massahs.”
It takes a good hour or so for a Northerner of any importance – specifically, Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the academic-turned-warrior played (as in Gettysburg) by Jeff Daniels – to appear. And it takes even longer for Col. Chamberlain to explain to his younger brother in arms (C. Thomas Howell) that slavery isn’t very nice, and that “darkies” should forever more be referred to as “Negroes.”
Amazingly – no, make that unbelievably – Gen. Jackson comes off as slightly more enlightened on the subject of race relations. When Jim (Frankie Faison), his faithful black cook, prays for the good people of the South to end slavery, Jackson smiles sympathetically and nods. To be sure, he could have added an “Amen.” But I suppose writer-director Maxwell figured there were limits to how much hogwash even he could reasonably expect his audience to swallow.
