Gods and Generals Reviews

Its theatrical release notwithstanding, this sprawling, would-be epic produced for Civil War buffs by Civil War buff Ted Turner is essentially a talky TV mini-series that features some spectacular battle sequences and runs almost four hours, including intermission. A prequel to GETTYSBURG (1993), it shares most of the same behind-the-scenes personnel, and several key cast members. The rambling story focuses on three principal characters during the first two years of the war: real-life Confederate Generals Stonewall Jackson (Stephen Lang, who played Confederate General George Pickett in GETTYSBURG) and Robert E. Lee (Robert Duval) and Yankee college professor-turned-enlistee Lt. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels). The narrative is structured around three important battles — at Manassas, Fredericksburg and Chancelorville — each staged with a distinctive look and style, and featuring ever-escalating amounts of carnage; in between, stilted speechifying all too often substitutes for dialogue. GETTYSBURG was based on Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 novel The Killer Angels; this film, adapted from the novel by Shaara's son, Jeff, tells its story solidly from the Confederate point of view. Since history is traditionally written by the victors, this is a perfectly valid approach. But it's still disconcerting to realize that the movie is almost over before anybody mentions that the "peculiar institution" of slavery might be a bad idea. Leaving aside the Celine Dion/TITANIC-style Celtic ballad that accompanies the opening credits, the film gets off to a solid start. Screenwriter/director Ronald Maxwell handles the enormous number of supporting characters adroitly, the battle scenes are convincingly harrowing, though the gore is mostly implied, an obvious clue to the project's television origins). The cast is generally accomplished, and Lang brings a particularly compelling mix of dignity and bloodlust to his portrayal of Jackson. After about an hour, however, the film undergoes a precipitous decline marked by absurdity and Victorian sentiment. The ludicrous scene that's supposed to show us the Civil War equivalent of a USO tour brings to mind a community theater production right out of WAITING FOR GUFFMAN (1996), and the vast number of obviously false beards becomes impossible to ignore. More crucially, a sub-plot involving Jackson's affection for an adorable 5-year-old (whose eventual death from scarlet fever the audience can see coming long before it happens) redefines the word maudlin. By the film's finale the descent into unintentional parody is all but complete, with a big death scene for Jackson complete with an angelic choir on the soundtrack — the surprise is that they aren't singing "Dixie."