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Gods & Generals
Director: Ronald F. Maxwell

People moan about how major Hollywood films are never innovative, but then when a truly innovative film comes along, people moan about how it doesn’t meet the entertainment standards of a Hollywood film.  Well, duh. 

Although the third day of the battle was anticlimactic from a dramatic standpoint, Gettysburg was an excellent film that focused on one specific event in the Civil War and communicated, with clarity and excitement, how that event unfolded.  It was generally well received.  Gods and Generals, a 2003 prequel that has been released on DVD by Warner Home Video (23413, $28), is less specific in its focus and was pilloried by critics and audiences.  It is about three major battles in Virginia previous to the battle at Gettysburg, the Battle of Bull Run (1861), the Battle of Fredericksburg (1862) and the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863).  It is also about three characters, Robert E. Lee, played by Robert Duvall, who gives the narrative its frame, Joshua Chamberlain, to the give the movie a token Northern perspective and link it more directly to Gettysburg as Jeff Daniels returns to fill the part, and Stonewall Jackson, played by Stephen Lang, whose success in those battles forms the spine of the narrative.  The movie, however, plays, deliberately, like it wants to be the best film of 1873.  The dialog is directly inspired by the diaries and letters of the day, and the dramatic structure of the film has a Nineteenth Century pace, with many of the performances wholeheartedly accommodating the script’s classical tone.  Sure, the 219-minute movie is a little slow, but what’s your hurry?  It’s not trying to be ‘Bad Boys III,’ it’s trying to transmit to you the entire mindset of the era, so that you can understand the pain and the quandary these people were in as they waged war upon their neighbors.  The computer effects are cheap, but the battle scenes are nevertheless fascinating and thrilling, totally justifying the time it takes to reach them.  The film does not compromise the integrity of its structure and format to satisfying a restless test audience, but if you come to the movie with an open mind, it is an inspired and refreshingly different work that can transport you into a past you’ve never experienced before, one that feels genuine at every turn.

Warner has split the movie to two sides, choosing a disruptive point for the break while a much better one occurs about 14 minutes later.  The picture is in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback.  The color transfer looks fine, though, as is mentioned above, the CGI components are often fairly obvious.  The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound supplies some nice separation effects during the battles and a general dimensionality at other times.  There are optional English, French and Spanish subtitles.

Warner’s Gettysburg DVD had a terrible commentary track, not because of its content, but because of the awkward way it was laid out, with long gaps between speakers and an often inneffective chapter encoding scheme to get you from one speaker to the next.  The talk on Gods and Generals is an improvement.  There is only 88 minutes of commentary, about half of it appearing on each side, but it is presented over an abridged version of the film, so that there is no searching or scanning required to hop from one comment to the next.  The director and screenwriter, Robert Maxwell, talks, as do two historians, Col. Keith Gibson and James I. Robertson, Jr.  All three direct most of their comments to the historical context of the film, taking note of various accuracies and explaining why other fictional embellishments were justified.

As much as I admired the film, however, the DVD’s supplementary features got me giggling at times, because some of the participants still seem to be stuck in the Nineteenth Century with the characters.  One of the commentators, for example, ought to have let the film deal with the reality of slaves who supported the Confederacy instead of attempting to justify it in his talk.  “Jim Lewis was probably in his mid-fifties at this time, and he was a slave to a man who had leased him to Jackson.  Jim Lewis was not a freedman by any means, but Jim Lewis forms a deep affection for Jackson, and so much so that I think it is most appropriate that in fact and in film, it is Jim Lewis who leads [Jackson’s horse] at the funeral.  He is right behind the casket, with Jackson’s horse.”

The first side inlcudes a 3-minute introduction to the film by Ted Turner, a music video with Bob Dylan showing him riding through both Confederate and Union camps (more giggles), a music video with Mary Fahl featuring a song from the film (and also its main theme) that sounds very much like the faux old-fashioned song in The Great Race (more giggles), and a trailer.  Side two contains a 22-minute production documentary hosted by the film’s only significant black actress (more giggles at the blatantly misleading marketing this involves), a decent 13-minute piece on the film’s production design that will definitely have you wanting to visit Harper’s Ferry, and, last but not least, a laugh-until-you-drop 14-minute profile of the very religious Jackson, The Life of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, in which one earnest scholar claims that the General followed the ‘Ten Commandments’ to the letter and was very concerned about fighting battles on Sundays, though he apparently obtained dispensation when it came to the one about ‘not killing,’ because not one scholar suggests he had any qualms when it came to breaking it.  “Jackson’s arm, which was amputated at Chancellorsville, was removed from the pile of amputated limbs and it was buried with glory, just outside the field hospital at Wilderness Tavern.  It remains there today, and it’s a sacred place, for nothing more than an arm.  The man has left us a legacy.  You don’t have to be a Confederate, you don’t have to be a Southerner, but to feel the power that this man exerted over an entire culture, over an entire people and an entire war.  It’s still there today.”  And thus, amid the tears of laughter, the only thing I could think of was why the featurette hadn’t been called, ‘Thomas “Stonewall”  Jackson: An Arm and a Legacy.’

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20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
Once Upon A Time In America
Gangs Of New York
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Windtalkers
Die Another Day
War & Peace
Eraserhead 
Hearts & Minds 

- by Douglas Pratt

 

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