Thanks for 'Gods and Generals': Michael Medved's open letter to Ted Turner

At this advanced stage of your long and complicated career you have finally crossed the line – making a contribution to your country and its culture so unequivocally positive and powerful that every American, regardless of political perspective, owes you a debt of gratitude.

No matter how one feels about your creation of CNN, your donation of a billion dollars to the UN, your marriage to Jane Fonda, your operation of the Atlanta Braves, your divorce from Jane Fonda, your dismissal of Christianity as "a religion for losers," your bison ranching, or your yachting, or your fanatical feud with Rupert Murdoch, you have now performed a massive good deed that should provoke universal appreciation.

Not that "Gods and Generals" – produced due to your singular determination and generosity – constitutes a perfect film; many commentators, especially among your politically correct pals, will no doubt find fault with it for a portrayal of the War Between the States that aims for truth rather than trendiness. Nevertheless, your personal investment of some $80 million in a project of such audacious ambition has resulted in a major movie miracle. I've been reviewing movies for 23 years now (having started at CNN, in fact) and I've never before sat spellbound for nearly four hours (the film runs more than three hours and 40 minutes, with an intermission) wishing, at the end, that this heroic movie had gone on even longer.

Despite the epic scale of this effort, director-writer Ron Maxwell reached the right decision in making no attempt for comprehensive coverage of the period he illuminates. The movie begins in April, 1861, and concludes 25 months later, making no reference to epic battles like Antietam or the Peninsula Campaign, or to important personalities like McClellan, Winfield Scott, Halleck or Fremont. Even though Maxwell focuses most of his attention on the single fascinating figure of "Stonewall" Jackson, he never portrays that general's most astonishing triumph – the breathtakingly brilliant Shenandoah Valley Campaign in the Spring of 1862, still studied today as an example of inspired leadership and masterful tactics. Maxwell chooses to concentrate on the general's human qualities rather than his undeniable military genius, and the result is a film that should appeal to women as much as men, to history fanatics as well as those who don't know the difference between Bull Run and Valley Forge.

Stephen Lang plays General Jackson with such startling authority and vitality that if there is any justice at all in Hollywood (a dubious proposition), he will receive a Best Actor Oscar nomination next year. The amazing element in this utterly riveting characterization is its balance and complexity: Lang's Jackson is simultaneously fierce and tender, spiritual and practical, petty and magnanimous, eccentric, implacable and incomparably charismatic. The physical resemblance to the historic Stonewall is uncanny, even eerie – complete with the blazing blue eyes that led his men to nickname him "Old Blue Light."

Robert Duvall similarly shines as Robert E. Lee, bringing to crackling life the dignity, poetry and ruthless edge of this legendary commander. Duvall takes over the role from Martin Sheen (of all people) who proved adequate but uninspired in Ron Maxwell's previous battlefield spectacular, "Gettysburg" (1993). Sheen's Lee seemed dreamy, almost effete, and much too kindly; Duvall's "Marse Robert" comes across (accurately) as an altogether more formidable customer.

In every way, "Gods and Generals" shows quantum improvements over "Gettysburg" – reflecting the vastly larger budget which your commitment made possible, Mr. Turner. The false beards and over-fed re-enactors that proved seriously distracting last time have been replaced by impeccable art direction, costumes, make-up and sets. The result, with the sweeping depiction of three crucial battles (First Bull Run, Fredricksburg and Chancellorsville, all filmed on the actual battlefields), ranks with "Alexander Nevsky," the Soviet "War and Peace," and "Saving Private Ryan" in terms of thrilling immediacy. One particularly moving sequence involves Meagher's Irish regiment charging for the Union up Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg, only to run directly into a Confederate Irish regiment, greeting them with recognition, tears, cheers, and deadly, withering fire.

With its emphasis on Jackson, including his moving friendship with a 5-year-old-girl during the Christmas season break in the fighting in 1862, "Gods and Generals" will undoubtedly draw criticism for its sympathetic treatment of the Confederate cause. In fact, Maxwell's four hours of cinema provide a richer understanding of Southern motivation and passions than Ken Burns ever did in his hours and hours of gripping documentary on PBS. Looking down at the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, just before the battle, Maxwell provides a stunningly effective speech for Robert E. Lee, as he recalls that he met his wife in that very village. "It's something these Yankees do not understand," he says, "will never understand. Rivers, hills, valleys, fields, even towns. To those people they're just markings on a map from the war office in Washington. To us, they're birthplaces and burial grounds, they're battlefields where our ancestors fought. They're places where we learned to walk, to talk, to pray. …They're the incarnation of all our memories and all that we love."

Maxwell treats his Union characters with less love, even while making clear their moral superiority on the issue of slavery.

Jeff Daniels returns to play Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Maine college professor who became one of the major heroes at Gettysburg. Though the events of "Gods and Generals" precede the struggle in "Gettysburg," Jeff Daniels looks unmistakably, distractingly older this time – showing the passage of 10 years. Maxwell also gives him a big moment before the Federal charge at Fredericksburg in which he recites the timeless words of Julius Caesar to inspire his men. The historical Chamberlain might well have delivered such a speech, but the hammy, lengthy, Latinate, declamation fizzles on screen. The heavy, intrusive and occasionally lumpish musical score by Randy Edelman and John Frizzell works poorly for this sequence, and other key moments in the movie.

Nevertheless, "Gods and Generals" inflames the imagination and inspires the soul – never more than in its frank, friendly treatment of the deep religiosity of men on both sides. The compassionate re-creation of so many vivid, decent characters never apologizes the paradox that soldiers in both blue and gray remained convinced that they served the Almighty's will in battle; Maxwell allows us to believe that both sides may have been right.

Small moments provide some of the movie's richest gifts: with Jackson and other officers singing "Silent Night" at a Christmas party while Stonewall yearns to see the newborn daughter he has never met; a Rebel and a Yankee walking on stones to the middle of a river, to trade tobacco for coffee and to pass a few peaceful moments; Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain explaining to his distraught wife (superbly played by Mira Sorvino) why he feels compelled to risk his life far from home; Lee declining to visit the wounded, dying Jackson, as if this refusal will force his indispensable lieutenant to a miraculous recovery.

There's also a fine moment, Mr. Turner, when your smiling face appears for a few seconds along with other Confederate officers listening to a spirited rendition of the music hall favorite, "The Bonny Blue Flag."

"We are a band of brothers, and native to the soil," sing these sons of the South, and that sense of regional pride, loyalty to hearth and home, permeates this remarkable and richly rewarding movie.

Even those who have criticized you in the past, Mr. Turner, should recognize that with this film you've raised your own Bonny Blue Flag and challenged other Americans of wealth and influence to follow your example. Focus groups and market studies would have tried to discourage you from investing $80 million in a strikingly intelligent four-hour spectacle that never stoops to score cheap political points or conform to current fashion by showing the Confederates as redneck Nazis, or providing a one-dimensional focus on slavery as the only issue in the war.

Any consumers of pop culture who long for more ambition and substance in American entertainment must rush to see this movie; in fact, to show support for bold new directions in cinema, you should see it several times. If this film succeeds beyond expectations it will send powerful messages to the gatekeepers in show business, encouraging a new emphasis on juicy, accurate historical and, yes, religious content.

This movie, in fact, could amount to a turning of the tide in the ongoing battle to enrich and uplift the culture. If that occurs, we must thank God and two generals: Ron Maxwell, and that unlikely leader for the cause of the angels, Ted Turner. As in any great battle, deliverance can come from an unexpected source.

Thank you, Mr. Turner, and I wish you great success with your courageous effort.

‘Gods and Generals' Succeeds ‘Chariots of Fire’ as the Christ-Honoring Film for This Generation
Review by Doug Phillips
Jackson: "My esposita! Come, before I leave, we must sit, read together ... a verse." Jackson finds his Bible on a shelf. Jackson: "Yes, yes, here. Corinthians. Second Corinthians, chapter 5. I have been thinking about this verse." Anna puts her hand on his, and they read it together. "For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." They kneel together, his arm is around her. -- From the script of Gods and Generals
In every generation, one film emerges from the dust heap which is Hollywood and reminds even the most hardened of us skeptics that God can turn ashes into beauty, that He often works outside our tidy little mental boxes, and that there yet remains a witness for Jesus Christ in our culture -- though that witness may take the form of a hero speaking from the grave. When I was a young man en route to college, that film was Chariots of Fire, the epic tale of Christian Olympian Eric Liddell. For our children's generation, that film is Gods and Generals, the stunning prequel to the Civil War masterpiece Gettysburg.
THE HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR'S CUT
In February of 2002, I flew to Hollywood with my father to see a private five-and-a-half-hour director's cut with our friend Ron Maxwell, the genius behind the movie. None of us were prepared for what we saw that day -- what can only be described as the most compelling and distinctively Christian tribute to principled biblical leadership that this generation has seen on celluloid.
It took me more than a week to recover from what I experienced. For one brief moment in our lives, those of us in that forty-person theater were transported out of the twenty-first century and into the more distant time of the Civil War, the events of which would help define the people which we are today. And for a few hours, we were allowed to live and breathe with the man whose very sobriquet has become synonymous with manhood. We rode with Stonewall. The heart and the soul of Gods and Generals is Stephen Lang's never-to-be-surpassed portrayal of Thomas Jonathan Jackson, the most misunderstood, but most overtly evangelical and Christian general in our nation's history. (See Life and Campaigns of Stonewall Jackson by Robert Louis Dabney.)
Here we see Jackson seeking to win dying souls, not to some god, but to Jesus Christ. Here we watch him praying that God would allow a cessation from battle to honor the Holy Sabbath. Here we weep with him as he rejoices that God would bless the fruit of the womb. Here we see the man, who was known to most as a warrior, demonstrate a love and loyalty to his wife so precious and sanctified that an aura of holiness engulfs the couple as they pray before their God.
Here we watch in awe, as we have never watched a man before, embrace a holy ferocity in battle motivated by the singular belief that the warrior of Christ need never fear bullets, for he will not die one day sooner nor later than the sovereign God decrees. And here, with heartbreaking anguish, we watch the dying warrior commend his soul to his God, while the loved ones around him bathe him with hymns of eternal love to the Savior.
After seeing the film, James Robertson, our nation's premier Civil War historian, declared that "Gods and Generals is the greatest Civil War film I have ever seen, and I have seen every one of them." Historian Bill Kauffman commented: Mr. Lincoln said he liked his speeches short and sweet, so here it is: The new Warner Brothers picture Gods and Generals is not only the finest movie ever made about the Civil War, it is also the best American historical film. Period.
Writer-director Ron Maxwell's prequel is so free of cant, of false notes, of the politically conformist genuflections that we expect in our historical movies, that one watches it as if in a trance, wondering if he hasn't stumbled into a movie theater in an alternative America wherein talented independents like Maxwell get $80 million from Ted Turner to make complex and beautiful films about what Gore Vidal has called "the great single tragic event that continues to give resonance to our Republic."
MAXWELL: HUMBLE, VISIONARY, FEARLESS
By this film, Maxwell has emerged as the most humble, the most visionary, and the most fearless director of the day. His humility is evidenced by what the film does not say, as much as by what it does say. Maxwell understands that the poignant complexities surrounding the Civil War and the profound nobility of purpose imagined by the players on both sides of the conflict demand a film that neither preaches nor skirts the true issues. He not only refuses to reduce history to trite sound bites, but he weaves a film that requires the viewer to understand the heart and soul of the key players on both sides before making judgments. Maxwell's vision is especially impressive.
He has understood what no other producer of note has understood -- namely, that a profanity- and sensuality-free epic battle film with an overtly evangelical Christian protagonist can be utterly compelling to the people of this nation. Not since Cecil B. DeMille has this even been attempted. Yet many viewers will find that Maxwell surpasses even DeMille in his open enthusiasm for teaching history through the lens of Christian heroism. Maxwell is simply fearless.
My first reaction after seeing the movie in 2002 was, "it will never reach the theaters -- someone will blackball the project." Maxwell has dared to tell the truth about the much-maligned Southern cause: Namely, that the leadership was predominantly made up of men whose entire ethic was defined by their personal relationship with Jesus Christ; and that black men and women -- many of them brothers and sisters in Christ with their white counterparts -- willingly and proudly served with the Confederacy, standing against those whom they perceived to be the invaders of their homeland.
But note: Maxwell is not taking sides. He is simply presenting truths that are not easily processed by those who want to reduce the complexities of history to socially acceptable sound bites about slavery. Equally compelling is Maxwell's portrayal of the federal soldier, personified through the character of Joshua Chamberlain (played by Jeff Daniels).
I predict that even the most ardent Southerner will find himself deeply touched by Chamberlain and the heroic battle of the Irish Brigade. I spoke with actors Stephen Lang (Stonewall Jackson), Jeff Daniels (Joshua Chamberlain) Bruce Boxleitner (General Longstreet) and Bo Brinkman (aide to Lee) during a visit to the film set just a few weeks following the 9-11 disaster. (I was visiting with my sixteen-year-old brother, whose "home school project" was to personally assist director Maxwell for several months.) Each of these men, in their own way, indicated that this film was different from any other project on which they had previously worked, that their participation was a labor of love, and that their own lives had been influenced by discovering the nobility of the men they portrayed.
Which brings me back to my own amazement about Gods and Generals: In one of the more remarkable episodes in the history of modern film, the Lord moved in the life of a Hollywood writer/director/producer to speak to the issue of manhood and faith, and then gave him favor in the eyes of media mogul Ted Turner, who opened up the door by bankrolling the $80 million project.
Impossible, you say? We serve the God of the impossible. Now here's some tough medicine: If this film had been left to the Christian community to produce, it probably would never have been made -- not for lack of money, not even for lack of ability -- but for lack of a courageous vision. Too many Christians would have been afraid of the inevitable and bogus charges of racism which abound whenever Confederate leaders are portrayed favorably. They would have been afraid of Jackson's uncompromising and manly Christianity. But most of all, they would have been afraid that the film was, well, just too Christian!
That's right. Christians are afraid of overtly Christian culture. Most Christian filmmakers and cultural communicators have bought into the notion that one must either reduce the Gospel message to trite little maxims, or present it with such subtlety that the Gospel message is almost undecipherable. Don't get me wrong. There's a place for subtlety, but there is also a place for the overt proclamation of truth.
Gods and Generals presents orthodox, no-holds-barred Christianity. Not because the film was designed as a tool of evangelism, but because the film is faithful and true to the life of a soldier who was first and foremost an obedient evangelist for Jesus Christ. This is not a "nice" film, but Christianity is not always "nice." It's not nice when a general is called to execute his own soldiers for desertion. It is not nice, but it is biblical, as Jackson explains with tremendous clarity and precision. It is not nice to pick up the sword and go to battle, but when one is defending one's homeland, it is mandatory.
My single greatest concern is that many Christians will lack the spiritual and theological maturity to understand the consistency and orthodoxy of Jackson's worldview. They will seek to evaluate this man through the twenty-first century grid of pop-Christianity, or brand him a self-contradiction, or an enigma.
The truth is that Jackson was one of the most rigorously consistent and principled leaders in American military history. He represents the type of man we rarely see any more: focused under pressure, fearless in the face of death, ferocious in battle, but singularly tender in home life and wedded bliss. (See: Beloved Bride: The Life and Letters of Stonewall Jackson to His Wife to better understand the Christian character of this great man. (Click here to see how you can receive a free copy.)
CONCLUSION
Those of us privileged to watch the director's cut with Maxwell last February knew that we had observed something truly extraordinary, something which was bigger than the film itself. Here was a movie that would do more than accurately record history; it would make history. Maxwell has given the children of this generation the opportunity to gain rich insights into the fathers of their fathers. Only by engaging their history truthfully can we even dare to understand our present identity or our future destiny as the American people.
We sat motionless, completely unable to speak even after the last credit rolled and the music came to an end. The first words I heard came from a man sitting near me, a writer of some note. Fighting back the emotions, the writer whispered: "He's given me my country back." And so he has.
Ron Maxwell has defied the political correctness police of both the Right and the Left by giving the American people a truthful vision of their past. He has shown a time when men defended women, when faith in God defined a man's vision of duty, when the greatest leaders were also the most committed Christians.
For the first time in the history of modern major motion pictures, a director with guts has given us the opportunity to understand the complexities, the beauty, the horror, the glory, the tragedy, and the Gospel witness found in one of the greatest fratricides in the history of any people.
After the review, my father and I drove director Maxwell home. That night we prayed with him and for him. We prayed that the final product would be pleasing to God, that God would use the film to bring honor to Jesus Christ, and that millions would better understand manhood as a result of watching the film. What a blessing to think that the testimony of a warrior who died more than one hundred and thirty years ago could lead people to Christ today.
Gods and Generals is rated PG-13 for battlefield violence.
Doug Phillips is the president of Vision Forum and the producer/director of the documentary film Raising the Allosaur. He is the proud 38-year-old big brother to Samuel Phillips, a 16-year-old home educator who served as personal assistant to director Ron Maxwell on the film set of Gods and Generals, and both a Yankee and a Confederate extra in the film. At the time of this writing, Doug has yet to see the edited and final 3.5-hour version of the film. To learn more about Christianity during the Civil War, we suggest:
Beloved Bride: The Letters of Stonewall Jackson to His Wife
Christ in the Camp: The True Stroy of the Great Revival During the War Between the States
The Life and Campaigns of Stonewall Jackson , by Robert Louis Dabney
Yankees vs, Rebels, an audiocassette discussion of the issues behind the War

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