Instant Review: Gods and Generals

I rented Gods and Generals last night and watched it alone because all my friends have their noses duct-taped to the grindstone. Of course, it's three and a half hours long, so I was up way past my bedtime (and got up at 7:15 to go pray outside a nearby abortion clinic). But the film itself? I'll grade it a "C". It scores perfectly for historical accuracy, but I found it longwinded and boring as a film.

The main characters are Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang) and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, with Robert E. Lee hovering in the background as a demi-god. The film follows these commanders through the first half of the Civil War, ending with Jackson's death at Chancellorsville. It portrays them as very devout men, all opposed to slavery and very noble, men who love their wives, but who "could not love them if they loved not honor more." Choosing the name "Gods and Generals" gives them the right to do that, in a sense, and there is nothing particularly wrong with that: Jackson was extremely devout and rather eccentric, Lee was a gentleman soldier, and Chamberlain was a philosophy professor. In fact, nothing the film does is wrong. It's just that it doesn't do a lot of things right.

Gods and Generals would be a good movie if:
- It portrayed evil to counterpoint its good. The film never criticizes these devout men for leading so many to their deaths, nor does it show the evil of slavery as anything more than a social malaise.
- It portrayed death more poignantly. It actually does an amazing job at duplicating the Civil War attitude towards death: an unpleasant inevitability. While I don't like modern America's attitude that death should never happen to anyone, I think they made a lot less of the horror of Fredericksburg than they could have.
- It had a clear plot-line or climax. Perhaps the fact that I know way too much about the Civil War ruins the suspense for me, but there's never a sense that the Union might win at any point. Like in many Civil War games, the Confederates are just Better.
- There was any tension between the sides off the battlefield. It fails to capture the way brother turned against brother; the portrayal of the opposing Irish brigades was moving, but a sense of concord lost might add some drama and pain.
- It came out and said the Confederacy was bad. I'd like my hero in blue, please, because it's uninspiring to see him fight for the continuation of slavery.

To be really cruel to Gods and Generals, I'll recommend you go to its website, click on "Enter Advanced Site" and check out the game trailer.

OK, so maybe I'm being unfair to a movie that did most things well, and just lacked that oomph to put it over the top. Really my gripe is that I've only ever seen one Civil War movie that I love (and I love the Civil War!): Glory, which I saw in the theatre at age 8 with my dad and remember vividly years later. Needless to say, the Civil War has plenty of Glory-esque material for more possible films. Sherman's march to the sea comes to mind, or Grant's career, or the Baltimore riots, or the immigrant regiments (who did get a few minutes in G&G), or the infamous XI Corps. I'd love to see more tough guys: westerners, farmers, woodsmen; men James Fenimore Cooper would have written about. The gentlemen-soldier angle has been examined ad nauseum, and the reality was - especially in the South - that poor, non-slave-owning whites bore the brunt of the conflict. Let's get some blood, sweat, tears and toil in there! The chaos of the battlefield can easily be captured on camera, and if a film is from a soldier's perspective it can (like the book "Red Badge of Courage") give a very claustrophobic, horrific feeling that the whole thing is beyond your control and you have no way out.

Of course, the biggest obstacle to making dramatic war films is people like me, who demand absolute historical integrity. But I for one would hold my peace about minor embellishments if they went ahead and made a really good Civil War movie. Here's to "Last Full Measure": it could attain at least to the B+ standard of "Gettysburg".