dir. Ronald F. Maxwell
Opens Fri Feb 21 at
various theaters.
I walked out on Gods and Generals a little more than an hour into the film, which runs approximately 220 minutes, not counting the intermission. Though I belong to the relative minority thrilled by the prospect of a four-hour movie about the Civil War, I simply didn't have what it takes to sit through another second of what may very well be the most vacuous, poorly acted, and pathetic depiction of the War of Northern Aggression ever committed to celluloid. One only needed to see the interminable credits to realize that Gods and Generals was as misbegotten as its miserably portentous title.
The breaking point for this botched epic came during the scene where Stonewall Jackson, played with hambone piety (and a piss-poor Virginia accent) by Stephen Lang, interviews a slave (Frankie Faison) for the job of cook for Confederate foot soldiers. Writer/director Ronald F. Maxwell dumps every drop of false nobility he can muster into this exchange; Stonewall's grace extends to practically bowing to his charge, who wipes the dew away from his eyes long enough to pledge eternal loyalty and gratitude to his Christian master.
The scene is revolting not because it's implausible--though I have a hard time picturing Stonewall being so chummy with the help--but because it fails to confess its own bitter irony. I'm sure there were slaves who expressed their disappointment at not being able to join in the fight to preserve old Vuh-ginia. It's galling, however, to watch a director use such a sentiment to defend the essential divinity of the secessionist cause. There are many layers of complexity in the relationship between the white and black South, and most of them have gone unexamined by motion pictures, to say nothing of human beings. Gods and Generals thinks it's peeling some of those layers away by depicting the Confederacy as a valid reaction against federal tyranny, which in many ways it was. Unfortunately, the states'-rights argument only goes as far as your willingness to forget that the chief component of said tyranny was the edict that owning other human beings was morally untenable, which in all ways it was. In the absence of that conceit, you're left in a vacuum. It doesn't take a scholar to understand that the Civil War was about more than slavery, but it takes a damn liar to pretend that slavery wasn't the economic and cultural linchpin of the conflict.
I have little doubt that this idea at least arises in the course of the full four hours of Gods and Generals, but I have even less doubt that it comes too late, and with too little emphasis. By the time we even meet a Union soldier (Jeff Daniels as Joshua Chamberlain), we've been subjected to so many testaments to Virginian glory that it's impossible to miss the filmmaker's sympathies. From General Robert E. Lee (the great Robert Duvall, doing his level best not to puke) choosing beloved state over beloved country to Stonewall Jackson's open-armed devotion to Gawd Almighty, Maxwell crams the characters' mouths with dialogue that sounds like narration from a Ken Burns documentary. At one point, before sending her two boys off to battle, a mother proclaims, "Surely, goodness and mercy have followed me all of my days." Please.
I wasn't the first to bail on the screening. When the lights went down, the theater was full; many in the audience were decked out in the epaulets and rubber sabers of full reenactment regalia, eager to see a film that might do justice to the nation-defining sweep of the conflict. But Gods and Generals began hemorrhaging viewers before the first cannon was fired. There were at least 10 walkouts prior to mine, and reportedly dozens more after. Though I didn't take a poll, I feel safe in assuming that it wasn't the stridently Dixiecentric perspective, nor even the Howard Fastian historical-fiction nature of the narrative, that compelled us all to flee.
While it's true that the film's politics lie squarely on the side of Southern apologia and its attendant selective memory, it takes more than fuzzy history to make people give up on a free movie. The real problem comes down to fake beards. Maxwell is so busy searching for epic magnitude that he's blind to the TV-miniseries caliber of his film's aesthetic, and the incalculable disservice it does to what could and should have been a grand gesture.
Shortly after exiting the theater with a barely muffled "Harrumph," I went home and, by way of penance and curiosity, watched a cloying, airless romantic comedy. Though I again failed to make it through the first hour, I came away with a modicum of respect for the picture, because unlike Gods and Generals, at least My Big Fat Greek Wedding wasn't pretending to be anything other than indulgent garbage.