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Hurray for "Gods and Generals"

February 16, 2003 1:09 am

WASHINGTON--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 to his epic "Gettysburg" (1993) 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."

Come Friday, "Gods and Generals" will invade the nation's theaters in a commercial gamble by Warner Brothers that could be a masterstroke, à la Lincoln's maneuvering at Fort Sumter, or a disaster on the order of Pickett's Charge. The four-hour-plus "Gettysburg" was a commercial and critical success, but that and six dollars will buy Maxwell a cup of coffee in Hollywood.

Over eggs and toast in Charlotte, N.C., I spoke with the writer-director on the morning after his film was screened for one of those putatively Middle American "test audiences" that corporations solicit to grade shampoo, new flavors of M&M's, and big-budget movies.

"They operate from fear and loathing and a complete lack of understanding of what this film is about," says Maxwell of studio executives. "They might as well be looking at hieroglyphics." In test markets like Charlotte, the film scored spectacularly high with men over the age of 35 and not so well with teenage girls.

I asked Maxwell why so few films are made about American history. "There's a feeling in Hollywood that the audience doesn't care," he answered. "I think that's because those who make the decisions don't care about history. Their field of view is contemporary. Many studio executives, because they aren't interested in looking beyond their own lifetimes, draw the conclusion that no one else is interested, either. They don't understand that an audience is out there. Of course, they haven't catered to that audience for decades."

The epigraph to "Gods and Generals" is from George Eliot: "A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship.The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead." Maxwell thus tips us off even before the first strains of the powerful John Frizzell-Randy Edelman score that what we are about to see is not the Hollywood-squared version of the Civil War, in which Father Abraham and the purehearts vanquish blackguard slaveowners and the drooling proto-Klansmen who fight for them.

The abolitionists, God bless them, were right on the big issue of the day: 'tis a painfully incomplete "freedom" that includes the right to own men, women, and children. To the extent the Confederacy was built on man-owning, it was repellent. But as Maxwell understands--seemingly alone among those few who have deemed the Civil War worthy of celluloid--this was not the only issue, and to some Southerners, it was not even the major issue.

"Gods and Generals" is loosely based on a novel by Jeff Shaara, son of Michael Shaara, whose beloved novel "The Killer Angels" was the source of "Gettysburg." In the earlier film, Maxwell's rendering of Pickett's Charge and the Battle for Little Round Top were shattering in their depiction of valor and carnage. But if "Gettysburg" is an absorbing film, it is very much an anatomization of that famous battle.

This film is a character study: not merely of men at war, but of specific men in a specific war. Maxwell follows four of the war's best officers--Confederates Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and Robert E. Lee, and Joshua Chamberlain and Winfield Scott Hancock of the Union army--through three battles leading up to Gettysburg: First Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. His focus settles on Jackson, seemingly the most forbidding of the quartet, a strange, distant, severely religious lemon-sucking man of the western Virginia mountains.

Maxwell expects to draw flak for his depiction of Confederate soldiers as human beings rather than the racist caricatures which the viewer expects in a modern film. "The culture has stiffened into a politically correct straitjacket," he says. "People don't feel they have permission to question certain shibboleths: among them that the Civil War was fought only for slavery."

Maxwell provides the fairest, most eloquent exposition of the Southern point of view ever presented on film--and yet as counterpoint we have always Joshua Chamberlain, the fighting scholar of the 20th Maine and the conscience of the movie, reminding us that black-skinned Americans are being held as chattel. "I do question a system that defends its own freedom while it denies it to others," Chamberlain tells his brother, and here we have the paradox of the CSA.

Contra Chamberlain, General Jackson frames the war as a question of competing patriotisms: "Though I love the Union, I love Virginia more."

He explains to his Shenandoah Valley volunteers at the war's outset: "Just as we would not send any of our soldiers to march in other states and tyrannize other people, so will we never allow the armies of others to march into our state and tyrannize our people." Jackson describes the fight as a conflict between the industrial North and the agrarian South. Defeat means not just the liberation of slaves; it would augur "the triumph of commerce, banks, and the factory."

Maxwell makes Jackson, played by Stephen Lang in a careermaking performance, the film's emotional and narrative centerpiece. His Stonewall is devout and adamant, but also quite capable of tenderness, as we see in a lyrical passage depicting Jackson's fondness for a doomed 5-year-old girl.

It is no accident that "Gods" precedes "Generals" in the film's title, for God is a constant and pervasive presence in the film. Jackson and Lee invoke God's name, and see themselves as instruments of His will. As Jackson tells his wife upon his deathbed, "Pray for me. But in your prayers, never forget to use the petition, 'Thy will be done.'" We wait for the kicker: In modern films, religious men must be exposed in all their hypocritical sanctimony. Surely Jackson's piety will be lampooned, or revealed for the oleaginous sham that it is. But no. Maxwell even has the gall to depict Jackson committing a wholly unexpected act oftolerance!

As Stonewall sits at the deathbed of General Maxcy Gregg, Jackson urges Gregg to "turn your thoughts to God." Gregg patiently replies that he is "not a believer." Jackson answers, "Then I will believe for the both of us." It is a quiet moment that resounds.

Jackson's relationship with his cook, Jim Lewis, a freeman of color, is rich and unsentimentalized. They shake hands upon meeting--Jackson calls him "Mister"--and if the times leave no question as to Lewis' social subordination, Christian morality has a way of confounding matters. As the men pray on a winter's eve, Lewis offers an impromptu petition: "How is it Lo'd, can you 'splain sumpin' to dis ol'Virginy man? How is it a good Christian man like some folks I know can tolerate dey black brothers in bondage? How it is Lo'd, dat dey don't jes break dem chains?" The tragedy of American politics is that the South hadn't an answer.

Lewis (subtly played by Frankie Faison) and the film's other significant African-American character, a domestic slave named Martha (played by Donzaleigh Abernethy, daughter of civil-rights titan Ralph), are not the usual ahistorical cardboard cutouts, but complicated human beings actuated by love, loyalty, and a yearning to be no man's vassal. Yet, I tell Maxwell, he's in for it. Contemporary etiquette requires movie slaves to speak the King's English, outwit their cruel and thick-skulled white masters, and have the rebellious gleam of Nat Turner in their eyes.

Maxwell wonders if audience members will think that Lewis' status as a freeman is a put-on: "They'll just have this received wisdom that all blacks in the South were slaves." Yet "how can you not have Jim Lewis" in the film? "He was with Jackson all the time. He was in the inner circle."Viewers will be jolted by the sight of black men laboring in the Confederate cause. "Ninety percent of the cooks, quartermasters, or wagonmasters were African-Americans," says Maxwell. "The Confederate Army couldn't have crossed the street without African-Americans, let alone fight a war."

One of the film's signal virtues is its respect for place. In a beautiful moment written by Maxwell, Robert E. Lee surveys the lovely land around Fredericksburg from atop a hill, before the battle. Lee explains to his adjutant that this is where he met the woman who would become his wife. He muses, "It's something these Yankees do not understand, 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 places where we made friendships and fell in love.They're the incarnation of all our memories and all that we love."

This film asks the vital question: What is patriotism? "For Chamberlain, the fundamental unit of patriotism is the United States of America," says Maxwell. "For Jackson and Lee, it is their state. The men are equally patriotic; they are admirable in that they have a sense of the group that transcends their individuality. But what are the borders of that country?"

The war seems to grow in the national imagination as it recedes in time. I ask Maxwell why. "It's the only major war fought on our soil," he replies. "It ravaged our country, especially the South. The other American wars were fought against 'aliens': This was a family feud. Americans who can trace their ancestry back to the 19th century have a direct relationship to the war. And the tension between individual and local decisions and federal-government decisions is still with us today."

Maxwell says that his Civil War films "would be impossible to make" without the thousands of dedicated re-enactors who compose his cinematic armies. He attributes the popularity of re-enacting to a desire "to return to what people think was a simpler time, a time of greater moral clarity."

He says this without condescension; in fact, with sympathy. "These are particularly confusing times because of the rapidity of change. We no longer live our lives in one locality. We're moving all the time, changing jobs. Our children and parents are spread out over continents. Through television we are kept in a state of constant agitation. No generation before ours has been under such assault on what many believe to be traditional values. So I think people want to retreat: to leave the whole bloody 20th century behind"--even to find solace in the bloodiest fields of the 19th century.

A decade has passed between the release of "Gettysburg" and the appearance of "Gods and Generals." I ask Maxwell if his understanding of the war has changed.

"Yes," he instantly replies. "My sense of the tragedy of the war has been deepened. That's why I wanted Shakespeare to comment on the war through Booth."

Yes, that Booth.

In a device as audacious as it is brilliant, Maxwell has a pair of traveling Southern Shakespearean actors, James Harrison and John Wilkes Booth, offer a running commentary on secession, war, and the duty of the artist. Booth had a flair for Shakespearean regicides. "It's almost as if he was trained by the greatest writer who ever lived to kill the monarch," marvels Maxwell. The Booth scenes are witty and foreboding. There is an unnerving moment when Booth, playing MacBeth at Washington's Grover's Theater, locks eyes with Lincoln as he declaims, "I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood."

Fanny Chamberlain, wife of Joshua, asks Booth after a performance of Julius Caesar whether his Brutus is a hero or villain. Booth replies, "It is for the audience to decide who is hero, who is villain. We simply play the parts allotted to us."

Maxwell understands just how startling it will be for an audience to see Southerners presented as men who believe they are fighting a defensive war against Yankee imperialists. But Fanny's question, he says, really applies to this entire astonishing film.

The phrase "great American novel" was coined by John W. De Forest, who wrote the first important novel of the Civil War, "Miss Ravenel's Conversion From Secession to Loyalty" (1867). From Stephen Crane to the Shaaras, American writers have engaged this central event in our national history with wit and fury and imagination, but our filmmakers have largely scorned it as a tedious interlude in a school textbook.

Until Ron Maxwell, who has given us an American masterpiece about the most myth-laden, destructive, and regenerative episode in American history. Who are the heroes? Who are the villains? You decide.

BILL KAUFFMAN is associate editor for American Enterprise Magazine. This article originally appeared in the March 2003 edition of the magazine.