I Don’t Need Your Civil War

Why are so many modern films set around the Civil War so terrible?

At least the poster was cool.

A late holiday weekend viewing of Ang Lee’s 1999 flop Ride With the Devil got me thinking about movies set during the War Between The States (or, depending on where you live in the South, the “War of Northern Agression.”) For as many very good or great films have been made about Vietnam, and of course World War II, there’s actually precious little good fimmaking about the war that:

1. retains the highest number of American casualties;
2. gave birth to the Gettysburg Address, probably as important a document to American notions of identity as the Declaration of Independence;
3. inflicted wounds on the sense of America as a unified place that in many ways have never healed.

With such fertile material for filmmaking – to say nothing of the tragic, almost mythical characters that led and served in the war – it’s a bit confusing why Hollywood hasn’t returned to this particular well more often than it has. Is it because studios market films to northern and southern states alike, and it’s hard to depict the Civil War without choosing a side? It can’t possibly be lack of interest – Ken Burns’ 1990 The Civil War miniseries not only drew viewers in record numbers but redefined American public broadcasting’s very programming shape and texture.

Once upon a time in the Midwest: Ulrich, Kilcher, Maguire

Ride With the Devil manages to deal with the war without actually getting into its main theatres, focusing instead on the bloody guerrilla warfare between the Union Army and Confederate-sympathizing “bushwhackers” that ravaged parts of Missouri and Kansas. A little-known pocket of American history, the fighting was as savage – and as cruel – as any modern conflict, yet perhaps because of its irregular structure these brush fire wars get short-changed in the history texts. Working from Daniel Woodrell’s novel, Lee focuses the film on the insurgent efforts of several bushwhackers, played by Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, and Jeffrey Wright. Muddying an already difficult and unfamiliar premise, McGuire’s “Dutchie” Roedel is from a Union-sympathizing family, while Wright’s Daniel Holt is an emancipated slave fighting for the Southern cause out of loyalty to his emancipator (Simon Baker). Taking place over several years – an epic scope, if not scale – the film eventually orients on Roedel’s efforts to escape the fighting while caring for his dead friend Jack Bull’s (Ulrich) lover (Jewel Kilcher) and child, following a well-staged but historically  ineffective raid on the Union colony of Lawrenceville, Kansas.

The film’s pacing is turgid and uneven, and details from James Schamus’s script often come across undernourished: events happen that beg for context or further elaboration but get dropped in favor of action sequences that in their turn are never fully utilized. The lack of focus in a film dependent on geography makes the effort as a whole feel rootless and restive with the scenes it chooses to present. Maguire’s soporific performance doesn’t help ground the film, either, and potentially intriguing performances by Ulrich, Kilcher, and the always proficient Wright become neglected as the plot unfolds. The end result is something like a collection of scenes starring the same actors that never adds up to a film, or even a narrative statement.

Someday the mountain might get 'em, but the law never will.

For as poorly realized as Ride With the Devil was, it at least didn’t suffer from the embarrassment of disingenuous excess that 2003’s Cold Mountain wore like a fifty-pound pyrite crown. Arguably the purest example ever of Oscar-baiting style over substance, Charles Frazier’s story of a wounded Confederate soldier’s (Jude Law) odyssey to his North Carolina home and true love (Nicole Kidman) was so bogged down by Anthony Minghella’s graceless script and direction, as well as an A-list cast dead set against expanding their established screen personae, that in many ways any sense of story or emotional texture never stood a chance.

Rather than explain an important chapter in American history or translate a well-written (if overrated) historical novel, the film instead reduces the war into a struggle between the beautiful and virtuous and the less beautiful but amorally vicious. Such conflict is possibly accurate, but likely not with the emotional and political simplicity the film chooses to display. Like the recent Kidman-led bomb Australia, Cold Mountain would rather dazzle than get its facts in a row or take the time to show why they are important. That’s fine for weightless entertainment, but when dealing with important history some kind of respect for the truth ought to be a necessary component of narrative integrity.

Kidman in one of her many pristine gowns worn during the film's wartime setting

A film starring an Englishman and an Australian and directed by an Englishman, shot in Romania, perhaps stood little chance of historical veracity. But the truncheon, one-dimensional depiction of most of the supporting characters combined with egregious geographical errors – Law’s protagonist manages to find the Atlantic Ocean by traveling west from Raleigh, North Carolina – undermine its attempts at dramatic weight. If a film gets so many basic truths wrong, why trust its insight into the esoteric? The film ultimately has little answer to whatever routine genre questions (Can love triumph over war? What is the point of conflict? etc) it raises anyway. The ending of the novel, meant as comment on the inevitability of violence, gets reduced by Minghella’s simplistic narrative understanding into another in an interminable parade of brutal acts presumably meant to give pathos but that serve instead only to further numb the audience.

On top of everything else, it's a remake.

Finally, though it’s not explicitly about the Civil War, 2007’s 3:10 To Yuma is enough like the two films discussed above, including reels of stylized violence and centering on a war veteran (Christian Bale), not to invite attention. A would-be Hollywood blockbuster with a heart of pyrotechnics and nothing but money on its mind, the film is neither plausible nor particularly well-crafted. And thanks to at least one spectacularly awful performance, it’s often difficult to watch on even the most superficial action-flick level.

Following a string of plot contrivances, Union veteran and hardscrabble farmer Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is given the task of taking roguish, Russell Crowe-like outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the government train that will escort him to prison. But Wade’s gang, led by his protege Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) conspires to stop the delivery, leading to a final shootout that defies the laws of physics and human anatomy. It’s the kind of film where, in a weird inversion of the great Westerns of the 1970s, all the bad guys are bulletproof and all the good guys can’t shoot straight, if only for the purpose of prolonging the gunfire. It was suggested elsewhere that Crowe and Bale might have challenged themselves by switching parts. That’s a good idea, but all their natural charisma can’t help director James Mangold’s (Walk The Line) distracted storytelling or to alleviate a screenplay crippled by a shapeless second act. Meanwhile Foster, in a part ostensibly created in studio focus meetings solely for the purpose of courting teen moviegoers, is beyond awful as the sadistic Prince. The term “restraint” is apparently not in the man’s acting vocabulary.

The emotional impact of a hotel courtesy phone to the head: Crowe

Hollywood’s love affair with the costume drama knows no bounds, and some of its earliest milestones – Gone With the Wind, Birth of a Nation - dealt with the Civil War at a time when many filmgoers were old enough to either remember the war or hear stories of its horror from parents and older siblings. Maybe nearness to the actual events inspires filmmakers to greater attempts at accuracy, as their audiences can readily cry foul if they take too many liberties: there are still World War II veterans around to gauge veracity, and plenty of Vietnam vets as well. Or maybe it’s the lingering presence of the wars’ unreconciled memories that guides writers and directors to create films that do more than favor violence and dogmatc characterization over accuracy and depth. It’s hard to write in a vacuum, and wars are nothing if not loud.

Maybe it’s both. But for as important as the Civil War was to our history, for all the lessons it still has to teach us about America’s purpose and how our differences of culture and values repeatedly tear us apart, it seems the films made about that terrible conflict ought to be better- or at least well-made.

- Michael Kabel
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