At the Movies
with Mark MooreheadGods and Generals
General Audiences: B
No profanity, but endless carnage. Includes intermittent sentimental home-front stories. Civil war buffs will enjoy, particularly if you’re from south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Family Audiences: C+
No profanity. No decapitations. Sustained battle sequences of men being mowed
down by exploding shells and a hail of bullets. Historically accurate and cautionary tale for well intentioned invaders.
This film could be renamed “God and the General” because it’s really about just one general and his unique relationship with God. Gods And Generals, the screen adaptation of Jeff Shaar’s novel and prequel to the epic Gettysburg, should not be viewed as an historically balanced highlight of the first two years of the Civil War.
Rather, this is a series of snapshots of three of the most humiliating battles lost by the Union army, along with profiles of wives back home keeping up a brave front.
Absent in the film is any mention of Grant’s victories at Shiloh and Vicksburg.
Although Virginian Robert E. Lee (played by Robert Duvall) was the genius behind most of the South’s military success stories in the Civil War, he takes a back seat in this four- hour epic spanning the period from April 1861 to June 1863.
Instead, Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson (played by Stephen Lang) is the central figure in this film.
Stonewall Jackson was Gen. Lee’s ablest and most popular general of the Southern army. Jackson received his nickname in the first battle of the film, best known as Bull Run, when Gen. Bee, trying desperately to rally the fleeing rebel troops, pointed to Gen. Jackson and cried, “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall.”
Ted Turner, who helped produce this film and is himself a Civil War buff, pays homage to one of the South’s most respected fallen heroes.
Stephen Lang manages to play Jackson better than Jackson. He’s the only character in the movie that is truly convincing. The real Jackson was accused by his critics of being an ice-cold killing machine and religious zealot, quoting the Old Testament on a daily basis as justification and proof of God’s preference for the South’s worthy cause.
His supporters argue that he was simply a deeply religious man who found comfort in the Bible during a terrible conflict that resulted in more than a million and half people killed or wounded.
Lang succeeds in striking a balance between these two characterizations.
Ted Turner was so enthusiastic about making a film that chronicles the Confederacy’s finest hour that he has a cameo appearance in the film as a Confederate general singing a robust rendition of The Bonnie Blue Flag.
And Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-West Virginia), another well-known Southerner, makes a cameo appearance sporting a white beard and mustache.
Unlike Gettysburg, which illustrated the human toll of fighting on both sides of the battle field, Gods and Generals depicts mostly the slow decimation of column upon column of blue-uniformed soldiers in three battles: First Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Southerners will flock to see this film.
Cameo appearances, by a director, were once the sole domain of the late Alfred Hitchcock. Today, cameos by directors are de rigueur.
Signs director M. Night Shyamalan is just one example of directors not content to sit behind the camera. Shyamalan apologized to Mel Gibson for mowing down his wife in Signs.
Ron Maxwell, director of Gods and Generals, couldn’t resist playing a Union officer among Colonel Chamberlain’s 20th Maine Regiment as they retreat in the battle of Fredericksburg.
If you saw Gettysburg, you may recall Colonel Chamberlain (played by Jeff Daniels), the union army hero of Little Round Top.
Daniels reprises his role in this prequel, beginning with the opening scene with Professor Joshua Chamberlain teaching a philosophy class at Maine’s Bowdoin College.
Both Daniels and Duvall play their roles low-keyed and second-fiddle to Lang’s Stonewall Jackson.
They’re both so soft spoken and one-dimensional you mistake them for enlisted men waiting to snap to attention when Lang walks back on the set.
In spite of the hero worship melodramatics of Lang’s Stonewall Jackson, there are other aspects of Gods and Generals that should be duly noted.
First, this is the only Civil War movie to show Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson wearing blue Union uniforms in the first weeks of the war.
Lee is offered the command of all Union armies by President Lincoln while still an instructor at West Point. Jackson, wearing his blue Union attire, comments that he loves the union but his loyalty is to Virginia first.
States’ rights were first and foremost to most Southerners, and they appear less like rebels in their Union uniforms and more like defenders of their homes and families from an invading federal arm of the government.
Northern sympathizers may not enjoy this film as much as they did Gettysburg. But, they should be patient. Director Ron Maxwell promises us a third installment to this trilogy that takes place between 1863 and the Appomattox Courthouse.
For Southern sympathizers let’s just hope its not General Sherman’s “scorched earth policy” March to the Sea.
