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Friday, February 21, 2003
Civil War epic loses the battle with tedium
The Ted Turner-produced 1993 Civil War epic, "Gettysburg," was one of the hallmark films of its decade: a tightly focused, historically accurate, no-nonsense depiction of the pivotal battle that managed to rivet one's interest over a four-hour-plus running time.
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"Gods and Generals," its prequel and the second part of an intended trilogy, has the same literary source (Jeffrey M. Shaara's "The Killer Angels"), much of the same cast and the same writer-director (Ronald F. Maxwell), but it somehow winds up being not half as absorbing.
History buffs will enjoy its lavishly staged battle sequences and rich visual evocation of the doomed ante-bellum South, but the rest of the audience is likely to find its three-hour, 49-minute running time (including intermission) a tedious sit.
The film starts just after Fort Sumter and concentrates on Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang), who resigns his instructing post at the Virginia Military Institute to take a position in the Confederate Army, kisses his wife goodbye and sets out to protect Dixie.
The rest of the script follows him through the battles of Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and other skirmishes leading up to Gettysburg, while occasionally fanning out to spend some time with a giant cast of minor characters, both historical and imaginary.
The movie seems to be about 90 percent battle scenes, and though the carnage becomes numbing, these sequences are generally well done, choreographed in great detail with legions of experienced Civil War re-enactors instead of the usual computer-generated digits.
Not an actor's movie, the performances -- Jeff Daniels back from the first movie, Robert Duvall as Robert E. Lee -- are nonetheless passable, and Lang (who, confusingly, played a different general in the first movie) is mesmerizing as the messianic Jackson.
But "Gods and Generals" lacks the driving unity that gave "Gettysburg" its focus, dramatic arc, climax and catharsis; and the filmmakers' decision to tell the story this time mostly from the South's point of view strips it of a moral perspective that's easy to swallow.
The movie also deliberately evokes the outdated conventions of Victorian melodrama, so its characters are endlessly reciting long passages of poetry, making flowery speeches and striking stagy tableaux that make them look like figures in a wax museum.
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