God and Generals -- Movie Review

Chicago Sun Times ^ | 2-21-03 | Roger Ebert

[Basilides]

GODS AND GENERALS / *1/2 (PG-13)

February 21, 2003

Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson: Stephen Lang

Gen. Robert E. Lee: Robert Duvall

Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain: Jeff Daniels

Sgt. Thomas Chamberlain: C. Thomas Howell

Sgt. "Buster" Kilrain: Kevin Conway

Gen. John Bell Hood: Patrick Gorman

Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock: Brian Mallon

Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film written and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell. Based on the book by Jeffrey M. Shaara. Running time: 220 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for sustained battle sequences).

BY ROGER EBERT

Here is a Civil War movie that Trent Lott might enjoy. Less enlightened than "Gone With the Wind," obsessed with military strategy, impartial between South and North, religiously devout, it waits 70 minutes before introducing the first of its two speaking roles for African Americans; "Stonewall" Jackson assures his black cook that the South will free him, and the cook looks cautiously optimistic. If World War II were handled this way, there'd be hell to pay.

The movie is essentially about brave men on both sides who fought and died so that ... well, so that they could fight and die. They are led by generals of blinding brilliance and nobility, although one Northern general makes a stupid error and the movie shows hundreds of his men being slaughtered at great length as the result of it.

The Northerners, one Southerner explains, are mostly Republican profiteers who can go home to their businesses and families if they're voted out of office after the conflict, while the Southerners are fighting for their homes. Slavery is not the issue, in this view, because it would have withered away anyway, although a liberal professor from Maine (Jeff Daniels) makes a speech explaining it is wrong. So we get that cleared up right there, or for sure at Strom Thurmond's birthday party.

The conflict is handled with solemnity worthy of a memorial service. The music, when it is not funereal, sounds like the band playing during the commencement exercises at a sad university. Countless extras line up, march forward and shoot at each other. They die like flies. That part is accurate, although the stench, the blood and the cries of pain are tastefully held to the PG-13 standard. What we know about the war from the photographs of Mathew Brady, the poems of Walt Whitman and the documentaries of Ken Burns is not duplicated here.

Oh, it is a competently made film. Civil War buffs may love it. Every group of fighting men is identified by subtitles, to such a degree that I wondered, fleetingly, if they were being played by Civil War Re-enactment hobbyists who would want to nudge their friends when their group appeared on the screen. Much is made of the film's total and obsessive historical accuracy; the costumes, flags, battle plans and ordnance are all doubtless flawless, although there could have been no Sgt. "Buster" Kilrain in the 20th Maine, for the unavoidable reason that "Buster" was never used as a name until Buster Keaton used it.

The actors do what they can, although you can sense them winding up to deliver pithy quotations. Robert Duvall, playing Gen. Robert E. Lee, learns of Jackson's battlefield amputation and reflects sadly, "He has lost his left arm, and I have lost my right." His eyes almost twinkle as he envisions that one ending up in Bartlett's. Stephen Lang, playing Jackson, has a deathbed scene so wordy, as he issues commands to imaginary subordinates and then prepares himself to cross over the river, that he seems to be stalling. Except for Lee, a nonbeliever, both sides trust in God, just like at the Super Bowl.

Donzaleigh Abernathy plays the other African-American speaking role, that of a maid named Martha who attempts to jump the gun on Reconstruction by staying behind when her white employers evacuate and telling the arriving Union troops it is her own house. Later, when they commandeer it as a hospital, she looks a little resentful. This episode, like many others, is kept so resolutely at the cameo level that we realize material of such scope and breadth can be shoehorned into 3-1/2 hours only by sacrificing depth.

"Gods and Generals" is the kind of movie beloved by people who never go to the movies, because they are primarily interested in something else--the Civil War, for example--and think historical accuracy is a virtue instead of an attribute. The film plays like a special issue of American Heritage. Ted Turner is one of its prime movers and gives himself an instantly recognizable cameo appearance. Since sneak previews must already have informed him that his sudden appearance draws a laugh, apparently he can live with that.

Note: The same director, Ron Maxwell, made the much superior "Gettysburg" (1993), and at the end informs us that the third title in the trilogy will be "The Last Full Measure." Another line from the same source may serve as a warning: "The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here."

Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

[Basilides]

I have to agree with Ebert on this one....this movie could single-handedly turn off an entire generation from Civil War history.

Somebody please get Civil War moviemaking out of the hands of Ted Turner and the overweight reenactors who totally discredit these movies as either entertainment or history.

[mware]

I saw the film yesterday afternoon. As much as I really wanted to love this movie, I found it below par.

It was interesting that the two scenes that caused the biggest stir out of the audience was when Ted Turner and Bryd showed up in full Confederate dress singing about the Bonnie Blue Fag.

[laconic]

I love Civil War (or any aspect of American history) but this was one of the LOOONGGEST movies I've ever gone to. Great battle scenes, good character development, fine acting and the Southern generals are presented largely for the decent and talented gentlemen/leaders they were. But there is a limit to length and drawn-out scenes; it should have struck even a novice producer that the film needed a good 80-90 minutes worth of editing.

[Dog]

You saw it???

I want to go see it...

I love the story of Joshua Chamberlain...

[Basilides]

"Great battle scenes, good character development, fine acting..."

What movie are you talking about ???!!

[mware]

Yeap, I saw the movie yesterday.

I am not positive but I think one of Bryd's lines was, "God Bless the Confederacy."

If you go see it, go to one of the Ritz's theaters. They have a 12 minute intermission. If they dont have an intermission, hold on up on the extra large soda.

[tuckrdout]

I could not disagree more! You must not have seen the movie.

This is a wonderfully made, very touching movie!

I heard several movie critics on the radio, give an off the cuff review of the film immediately after the screening; and they loved it. They stated that in this preview of industry professionals, everyone was rivated to their seats! There was not a dry eye in the house! Seems the critics had time to think this over and somehow change their minds by press time!

I suspect that Eberts review has much more to do with political commentary, than the actual quality and acting of the film. Why else would he include the comments about Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott?

This is a wonderful movie, being panned by liberal critics because it is a poignant portrayal of Christian men who are willing to put aside their own life and possessions to secure liberty for others. It puts flesh onto our American ideals. These liberals know how powerful that can be. And how damaging it is to their atheistic socialist agenda for America.

[mware]

I did thing the battle scene of the Irish Brigades assault on the stone wall of Fredickburg was well done. Also the part where they watched the Northern Lights after the battle.

[savedbygrace]

Movie review? This isn't a movie review. This is a series of political statements by a person who overcompensates for his lack of talent with an overabundance of hate.

I haven't seen the movie; I'll probably wait for the DVD. That way I can pause for bathroom breaks without missing anything.

[LS]

Saw it today, and I was disappointed, thinking it would be one of the best movies ever. I have to say the first HALF was superb, but as everyone here notes, WAAAAYYYY too long. Why can't this Maxwell guy find an editor?

I know many neo-Confederates will love this movie, and for good reason, as it states in the best possible light (and honest, to a point) the Southern point of view.

What it did not do was state as well the northern point of view, and I think the reason for this is that it had to speak through Chamberlain (Daniels is great, again), but this position was BEST propounded by Lincoln. Interestingly, the southern position could be stated by any general, or half the soldiers, but not by Jefferson Davis. But the Union position---especially the change from "preseving the Union" to freeing slaves---needed better explanation, and Lincoln's personal journey would have been the better vehicle for this.

Finally, for you CW buffs, can ANYONE explain to me why at Fredericksburg, the Union forces STOPPED at the top of the ridge to duke it out with the Confeds? Given that a) the Rebels were behind a wall, and b) were getting reloads, so they fired three times as fast, why didn't the Union forces CHARGE and negate the Reb advantage in firepower? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

[MoralSense]

	Author Archive E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% dim printurl printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version

February 21, 2003 9:00 a.m.
Battle Hymn
A complex look at Civil War believers.

t's been a critical Antietam for the film Gods and Generals, which opens in theaters Friday. Ron Maxwell's Civil War epic got massacred by reviewers. "Turgid, textureless and endless ... history as punishment," was the Associated Press verdict, typical of so many others. "Stiff, ponderous, fluttering in its 'poetry,' and crudely simplistic as an apologia for the Confederate ideology," says Entertainment Weekly. Declaims New York Press: "It is truly a whitewash of the past."

Well. If the four-hour battlefield epic doesn't work for reviewers on an artistic level, it's hard to make a case against that kind of judgment. But the moral and political indictment of the film as a "whitewash of the past" is politically correct slander. Gods and Generals commits the unpardonable sin of depicting the Confederate generals not as prototypes of Goering and Rommel, but as noble, tragic men whose motives for fighting were complex and fully human. The movie invites understanding of the historical south, not outright condemnation, and that's something that the present age will not tolerate.

Gods and Generals, which is loosely based on the Jeff Shaara novel of the same name, concerns itself with key battles in Virginia during the first half of the Civil War. It focuses on three characters: Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels), later a hero of Gettysburg; Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee (a stunning Robert Duvall); and most especially, Lee's right hand, Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang). While there is a great deal of battlefield action, the film takes care to show the thinking that went into each great man's reasons for fighting the war. The Southern side gets much more screen time, perhaps because Maxwell leaned toward the north in his previous film, Gettysburg.

The film is about conflicting ideas of patriotism, God, personal conscience, and history. Its basic point is that Lee and Jackson (like many southerners) fought not because they loved slavery or detested the Union, but because they felt honor-bound to defend their homeland.

What is one's homeland? To mid-19th-century Americans, most of whom never traveled more than a few miles from the place of their birth, the United States was an abstraction. In those days, it was much easier and more natural for them to feel loyalty to their state and its people. The rock singer Little Steven has a great song called "I Am a Patriot," the chorus of which captures this deeply personal sense of nationalism: I am a patriot/And I love my country/Because my country/Is all I know/I want to be with my family/With people who understand me/I got nowhere else to go.

Lee opposed secession, but once the decision was taken, it was this sense of duty that bound him to fight for the Confederacy. If you or I had been Virginians back then, how many of us would have had the courage to have gone north to fight for the Union, or even had the imagination to conceive of such a thing? What Maxwell is trying to do here is show contemporary audiences why good men would take up arms to defend a government and a culture that enslaved other men. It is for much the same reason that black GIs fought bravely in World War II for a country that still didn't guarantee them their full rights: because their homeland asked them to.

Maxwell takes a big risk in downplaying questions of race and slavery here. You can understand why he may have done this; do modern audiences really need to be told that slavery was evil? We see now how vicious and evil slavery was, but if you're trying to show audiences why Lee and Jackson behaved as they did, you're simply not going to put slavery front and center, because it didn't figure prominently in their own deliberations, certainly not compared to the centrality of the claims their native soil had on their loyalties.

Perhaps this explains why some critics find it phony that the film's two black characters, a house slave named Martha (Donzaleigh Abernathy) and a cook named Jim (Frankie Faison) relate so affectionately to whites. It's easy to see these portrayals as Confederate clichés of happy black folks watched over paternally by their masters. This would be wrong, and unfair. However paradoxical, it's simply true that whites and blacks in the south loved each other despite the structural sin in which they were mired.

Anyway, Martha and Jim both express a desire for freedom, and a clear awareness of their people's oppression. There is a lovely scene in which Jim, who prepares meals for Jackson's camp, prays under a starry sky with the general. Jackson is an extremely pious Presbyterian, and prays constantly. Standing next to Jim, with whom he is close, Jackson asks the Lord to protect Jim's family. Jim, also addressing the Almighty, prays, "How is it, Lord, that good Christian men, like some men I know, tolerate they [sic] black brothers in bondage?" The general stands next to Jim, looking heavenward, beseeching God to "show us the way, and we will follow." Jim's face falls. He knows the general, his friend and a good man, just doesn't get it.

That scene serves to illuminate a particularly tragic aspect of Jackson's character. We see him throughout the film intensely praying, seeking to do the will of God. You cannot doubt his sincerity, nor the uprightness of his character. Yet there is a blindness there, an inability to grasp that his ways are not necessarily the Lord's ways. He can be absolutely merciless. One moment he is having gentle words of prayer at the bedside of a dying soldier, and in the next breath is chillingly calling for the total slaughter of the enemy. He is both tender and ruthless — again, a paradox, but a very human and very believable one.

Religion is an integral part of Gods and Generals, particularly on the southern side. Lee and Jackson are forever talking about God's will — Jackson at one point refers to his men as "the Army of the Lord," as he is about to execute deserters — but don't seem much troubled by the question as to whether or not their cause is just in His eyes. Jackson is a true Christian Stoic, believing that man's role was to be largely passive as the will of God worked itself out through history. His conception of God was austere and tribal, as in the Old Testament. Jackson thought God ordained slavery for inscrutable reasons, but in time would end it, if that was His will. Man's role is to wait on God, and accept everything he sends to us.

A convinced Calvinist, Jackson believed God had predestined each man to die on his appointed day. "My religion teaches me that I am as safe in battle as in bed," he says here. "That is the way all men should live, then all men would be equally brave." Yet this same noble conviction that allowed him to bear misfortune with equanimity also kept his conscience untroubled in the face of the unspeakable cruelty of slavery.

By contrast, the god of Col. Chamberlain is the more universalist and egalitarian vision we see in the New Testament. Chamberlain here gives voice to a vision of a God who expects His followers to act as His agents to bring justice to the world. If that should mean war, then we must make sure the ends we're fighting for justify the suffering war will entail. Unfortunately, Chamberlain's view, which I'm guessing is Maxwell's, gets short shrift in the film. Nevertheless, Chamberlain has a good monologue in which he explains that even though slavery has always been with mankind, it is intolerable, and if he has to die to "end this curse and free the Negro, then God's will be done."

There were tremendous historical consequences from this clash of religious visions. A soldier in battle must believe God is on his side in order to bear the pain and suffering of war, yet there is great danger in presuming that the Almighty endorses your actions. He is infinite; we are finite. Gods and Generals is filled with challenging theological questions, but the movie appears to have struck historically and theologically illiterate reviewers as showing little more than a bunch of Bible-thumping rednecks sitting around talking about Jesus while fighting to keep the slaves back on the plantation.

Maxwell told me he made Gods and Generals "without judgment of that generation" of men who fought the Civil War. It wouldn't have been true to history to make a film depicting a simplistic conflict between good and evil. Slavery was completely indefensible, but there was more to that war and the men who fought it than race hatred.

"It's easy to judge [antebellum southerners] because of slavery," Maxwell said. "At the same time we should recognized that they were incredibly faithful people, of incredibly strong fiber. We've descended from those people, and we can take solace from that."

Solace? Maxwell seems to have no use for the au courant idea that all decent people, southerners in particular, must repudiate and be ashamed of their ancestors to be morally and socially acceptable. Brave man. He'll pay.

	http://www.nationalreview.com/dreher/dreher022103.asp

[Thebaddog]

If you want to read some powerful history, read Bruce Catton's trilogy on the Civil War. Those were honorable times for all those souls.

[tm22721]

It sux big time.

BUMP

[75thOVI]

I have to agree entirely! Let's not let historians destroy a great movie. Let's get it back into the hands of Hollywood scriptwriters where it belongs. With real script writers we would not have missed the scene where Jackson ordered his slave whipped for praying for his freedom. There would have been a lot more sex, and foul language. There would have been at least one homosexual affair. We would be spared that hoky death scene at the end, Who came up with that "rest in the shade of the trees" thing anyway? Lee's heroin addiction could have been portrayed in a more sensitive light. There would have been a lot more skin! Ebert would undoubtedly find the correct version, "The Feel Good Hit of The Year!!", and "Must See Family Entertainment!!!" For the love of an unspecified deity, let's get out history back in the hands of those who know how to treat it right!

[Basilides]

I have no argument with the "positive" chatacter portrayal of the Army of Northnern Virginia Commanders...but the romanticised dialogue was incredibly stiff and cliched.

Do you really think these guys talked to each other in these ways ?

The battle scenes could be given an A for effort and attention to detail, but an F for the total lack of passion, fear and desperation in the actions of the vast majority of the reenactors.

And Jackson's character was a way too softened...he was a cold-blooded military commander...and the movie actually down-played the extent of his religious convictions...the man was a zealot...not Grandpa Walton.

Much more not to like...but I'll let others comment...this is going to bomb at the box office...

[Dog]

Read the history of Joshua Chamberlain..

[Chemist_Geek]

I suspect that Eberts review has much more to do with political commentary, than the actual quality and acting of the film. Why else would he include the comments about Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott?

This is a wonderful movie, being panned by liberal critics because it is a poignant portrayal of Christian men who are willing to put aside their own life and possessions to secure liberty for others. It puts flesh onto our American ideals. These liberals know how powerful that can be. And how damaging it is to their atheistic socialist agenda for America.

I believe you are on to something. Having just returned from seeing the movie, I found that while as a film it may leave some to be desired, its story is stirring and noble.

The liberal media critics may, deep down, be upset that the film doesn't depict the Confederates as slavering drooling monstrosities but as decent, honorable people.

[tuckrdout]

LOL! Perfect! Then they would have loved it, you are so right!

[75thOVI]

For some reason the post left out my < Sarcasm Off > tags. Please take note, I don't want to be flamed by the wrong people.

[mware]

I suspect that Eberts review has much more to do with political commentary, than the actual quality and acting of the film. Why else would he include the comments about Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott?

I suspected that same thing when one of the Confederate officers (Jackson I think) that if the war ended badly for the Union the Republican would just take the money they made off of it and not care, but if the Confederates lost they would lose their freedom.