"Gods and Generals" is Good Hollywood -- Don't Go See It

Gods and Generals, Ted Turner and Ron Maxwell's followup to 1993's Gettysburg, wants to be a quintessential Civil War epic. It succeeds. First of all, it is long, timing out at almost four hours (six hours for those with the stamina to make it through the DVD version). More to the point, though, "G&G" has everything Hollywood requires of its Civil War epics. It's all here: citizen soldiers, brother against brother, displaced families, meditations on war, inspiring speeches, officious bureaucrats, foolish generals, and remarkable generals.

Oh, and also slaves. Of course there have to be slaves, in some fashion. After all, wasn't the Civil War about slavery, or at least those with an interest in the "peculiar institution"? Of course, no one is quite sure how slavery should be dealt with in these films, any more than there is popular consensus on the relationship between slavery and the Civil War. The same could have been said about Americans during the period depicted in "G&G." As Abraham Lincoln conceded in his second inaugural address in 1865, everyone knew that slavery was "somehow" the cause of the war.

But, oh, what a range of possibilities Lincoln's evasion permits. Did slavery "cause" the war by offering Northerners a righteous cause to fight and die for? (Almost certainly not.) Or did it spark the conflict by symbolizing the struggle between burgeoning industrial capitalism and an older agrarian tradition? (Probably not.) Was it slavery, and slavery's expansion, that broke the back of the second party system, leaving armed conflict the only alternative to a political system in shambles? (Probably so.) Or, as an older generation of southern historians posed it, was it the mere presence of the barbaric African in the midst of the civilized Anglo-Saxon that led to what novelist Thomas Dixon called the "causeless conflict"? And then there are those who steadfastly, in the face of all evidence (even Confederate officials' own statements!), deny that slavery was somehow implicated in the start of the war.

What is indisputable, even by the most fire-eating Confederate apologists, is that slavery did become a facet of the war. From runaway "contrabands," to Congressional Confiscation Acts, to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the Confederacy's late-war dalliances with trading liberty for military service - slavery and its fate became a pressing concern for both Union and Confederate governments.

Popular culture, particularly film, has never coped well with this. The first feature-length American film, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), portrayed the Civil War as a tragic conflict between brothers, during which white men across regions recognized their shared masculinity by acknowledging each other's heroic deeds. The Birth of a Nation reflected the political exigencies of its age -- a time when North and South were re-forging bonds sundered by the war, extended hands across a bloody chasm filled, unfortunately, with the bodies of African Americans lynched, segregated, or disfranchised by Jim Crow. It offered nothing positive for African Americans. Rather, former slaves were portrayed as black beasts, hell-bent on the violation of the white women, and politically empowered by the evil plan of the Radical Republicans to wreak vengeance on the war-torn South.

The movie was a huge hit. Audiences flocked to cinemas to see the new art form and the epic story of America it told. Not all concurred, however. Black scholars, such as W.E.B. DuBois, and civil rights advocates, such as the nascent National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), criticized the film as a shameful version of the past. More prominent voices, however, slandered the critics as a biased minority, stamping the film with the imprimatur of scholarly objectivity. President Woodrow Wilson, himself a former history professor and president of Princeton University, called the film "history written in lightning."

Few Americans today could watch The Birth of a Nation and consider it an objective and scholarly representation of American history. Some might have a problem, however, with the next big Civil War movie. Released in 1939, Gone with the Wind has made more money than any other film in American history, and regularly tops lists of personal favorites and significant films. Producer David O. Selznick built Gone with the Wind on the foundation of Margaret Mitchell's popular page-turner of the same name. He consciously softened the book's more virulent racial imagery (Mitchell considered Thomas Dixon, the author of the novel that became The Birth of a Nation, a hero and literary forebearer), making it more palatable for a new racial era -- one in which civil rights organizations were beginning to stem the tide of Jim Crow racism, and one which would shortly call upon African Americans to help fight fascism abroad. Instead of the black beasts of The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind offered us Mammy -- the loyal and asexual protector of "her" white folks.

It was almost half a century before Hollywood again tried its hand at the Civil War epic. Following World War II, few filmmakers essayed the large-scale Civil War film. There were some attempts, but these were often critical and box-office failures. Television also stepped into the fray, offering banal fare such as "The Americans" in 1961.

For some reason, though, the big Civil War battles piece did not work in the post-war era. Perhaps the Cold War, with its themes of domestic subversion and paranoia, shrunk the canvasses of films below the threshold required of Civil War epics. Films such as The Ox-Bow Incident and High Noon could use closed sets and dark tones to enlist the Western genre in their cause, but the Civil War -- with its grand sweep and Victorian sentimentality -- seemed too naive for the Nuclear Age. The '60s proved no more fertile a seedbed for Civil War films: the national self-searching provoked by the Civil Rights Movement, the generational tumult of the youth movement, or the gnawing discord over the Vietnam War -- all made for times unreceptive to the heroic themes of older Civil War films. When the era was treated, as in 1965's Shenandoah, it was invoked in a way that reflected the fierce domestic tensions of a crisis-laden generation.

Generally, though, instead of using the Civil War to grapple with concerns at the center of the American experience, the Civil War was moved to the frontier, where it became a staple setting for television westerns such as "Bonanza" (1959). It also hovered in the background of "Confederate Westerns" such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). These films partook of the late 1960s' and early 1970s' penchant for antiheroes - like Bonny and Clyde, their dark protagonists offered symbols of alienation from modern life and stressful times.

It was not until American culture had thoroughly washed away the Zeitgeist of the '60s that a different kind of Civil War film became possible: Glory, built upon a decade's worth of conservative reaction to the tumultuous '60s. During that time America re-wrote its narrative of national defeat in Vietnam (through "successful" interventions in Grenada and later Panama), and rolled the clock back on civil rights. At the same time, however, the liberals of the '60s became the culture-makers of the '80s, and the Civil Rights Movement quietly cemented its institutional gains.

Glory -- the story of an African-American regiment's struggle against racism at home and Confederates down South, was just the film for the era. On the one hand, it heralded the coming-of-age of African Americans as legitimate participants in the national story. On the other, it offered one-dimensional black characters who, despite persistent racism in their own army, "buck up and kick in" for the national cause. Somehow, in the end, shared masculinity and the pointless deaths it demanded were to have redeemed both African Americans and the nation as a whole.

Glory's thin veneer of racial liberalism pointed filmmakers into the future. Having tackled the difficult issue that had been impeding resurrection of the Civil War era in film, it permitted new movies that would not feel much need to reinvent its racial wheel. Instead, the path was clear to presenting what American audiences really loved: battles -- dirt-showered, ear-splitting, guy-loving battles. In 1993, Ted Turner produced Gettysburg, a tortuous and over-literal version of Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Killer Angels (1973). Gettysburg profited from the popular interest and scholarly imprimatur of Ken Burns's well-received PBS documentary "The Civil War" (1990). More than anything, it reaped the dividends of decades of pop-culture's neglect of the nation's central story. Long in the bank, the interest finally paid off.

Now, ten years after, we have the "prequel" to Gettysburg: Gods and Generals.What does it mean? Since Gettysburg, the Civil War has become a legitimate if still risky topic for the American culture industry. Will Gods and Generals ratify its producers' faith in the American public's taste for history?

The prognostications for the film were not good. For one, the novel upon which the film is based sprang not from the tortured genius of Michael Shaara, but the crass opportunism of his son, Jeff. If the film is anything as clunky as the novel, forget it. For another, "G&G" clocks in at even longer than its antecedent, making it a true test of the Civil War's popularity. Will people spend eight bucks and an entire evening on it? With over $50 million sunk into the enterprise, much is at stake. We can only hope they got the beards right this time.

I saw the film last night, and they did. Gods and Generals turns out to be as long as advertised, but still an at-times compelling version of the Civil War from First Bull Run through the Wilderness. It is often scrupulously accurate on the minutiae, though some liberties have been taken with plot and character (witness Union General Winfield Scott Hancock's role as prophet of reasonableness in a world of bureaucrats, analogous to the part Buford played in Gettysburg). The film has clearly been put together with love and affection for the details of the campaigns, the gear, and the setting.

Make no mistake, though, it reprises many of the problems of Gettysburg, and adds a few new ones The script is often sentimental and epigrammatic. This could be excused in a historical film based on a generation that tended to express itself, well, sentimentally and epigrammatically. The direction does little, though, to breath life into this language or demonstrate that actual conscious humans said and meant such things. The blocking is amateurish, and the dialogue often has all the vitality of a high school history play, despite being delivered by some very professional actors.

Another criticism is that the film is pretty hard to penetrate if you don't already know a good deal about the cast and plot. Like The Lord of the Rings, it makes a whole lot more sense if you already know the story. Just as Peter Jackson made few apologies to the non-Tolkienites in his audience, so Ron Maxwell offers little for the casual movie-goer. This is a film for (and largely by) Civil War buffs. And this is a strange thing. Earlier generations' renditions of the Civil War appealed to a broad American audience, offering easily-digestible (if historically moronic and racially vicious) versions of American history. But "G&G" is an epic playing to a niche audience. Four and a half hours and we don't even make it to Gettysburg? Whereas the older films purported to teach Americans about their past (for the cynical, propaganda), "G&G" preaches only to the converted -- a narrow but eagerly-consuming slice of the market that knows what it wants. Ted Turner's not in the habit of making bad gambles; in trusting to millions of his detail-devouring fellow buffs, he will probably win again.

No, it's not in the details that the devil lives. It's in theme, sweep, and broad argument. Here it is largely moribund. The film lacks tension and drama; it builds little suspense, and wrestles with few of the themes it raises (see The Thin Red Line if you want a thoughtful war film). The engine that propelled The Killer Angels and Gettysburg -- the tension between Lee's military philosophy and Longstreet's -- is absent here.

"G&G" does have an intriguing central character, however, and it is not the Joshua Chamberlain who so intrigued audiences of the earlier film. This time, it is Confederate General Stonewall Jackson (played by Stephen Lang), the genius of the Valley Campaign of 1862 who kept Federal forces twice the size of his own befuddled and impotent. Jackson as a character has long intrigued Civil War buffs. A military genius, he was also an incredible eccentric, and pious to a fault. "G&G" packages him as a Confederate (and, somehow, national) hero.

In the process of lionizing him, the film submerges the very ambiguities that make him fascinating. The tension between Jackson's humanity (love for his wife, yearning for a child) and his ruthless battlefield efficiency offers the film its most promising avenue of exploration. But Maxwell and crew muff it, offering a Jackson who reconciles these two warring impulses. When Jackson cries over the death of a five-year-old girl he has befriended, his soldiers reason that in this rare display of grief must also reside his grief for his lost soldiers. Who says? Far more poignant and interesting for Jackson to have been capable of grief at the death of a girl, but not at the loss of a brigade.

Perhaps Jackson's anomalies are smoothed over because the actual Jackson was simply too unpalatable to be a hero of the sort the modern Civil War film is thought to demand: impassioned yet tolerant, intuitive yet reasonable (witness Chamberlain). Jackson would have made a great protagonist in a Civil War film made in the early 1970s -- a dark antihero who makes no excuses in fighting to enact a vision of the world in opposition to the status quo. In the modern climate, however, Jackson must be tamed, his excessive and dogmatic piousness bridled to the love of small girl -- a move of such melodramatic sentimentality that it could have been lifted from the pages of Harriet Beecher Stowe. For Maxwell, one suspects, Jackson's religion cannot be portrayed as a cause of his military prowess -- that would make him John Brown, an intolerant, fanatic, fundamentalist. Perhaps even a terrorist.

If Jackson's leading role does not provide grist for this history film's interpretive mill, what does? What has the film got to say about the war's causes and consequences? Let's face it, the barometer for any modern Civil War film's politics is its portrayal of slavery and race, and here the filmmakers trod the safe path they wore down in Gettysburg. The film speaks of the "peculiar institution" sparingly though self-consciously, weaving it into the script in dutiful homage to the racial liberalism its audiences expect. Joshua Chamberlain, the Union conscience of Gettysburg, again lectures on evils of slavery, reminding us that it is the liberties and rights of white men (as much as black) that are at stake. Southern officers convene over coffee, mentioning in passing that several popular generals support the idea of trading the slaves liberty for service -- an idea that was never seriously considered until the waning days of the Confederacy, and then only for the purpose of saving the Confederacy. (The proposal was defeated by high Confederate officials who declared that a Confederacy without slavery was not worth saving.)

We are also offered two African-American roles, one vaguely historical and the other fictional, that nonetheless echo the same theme. These are the characters of Jim Lewis, who was Stonewall Jackson's cook, and Martha, the house slave of the fictional Fredericksburg family used to anchor the plot. Both express their desire not to be slaves, but both are willing to make huge sacrifices to aid "their" white people. One remarkable scene portrays Jim praying with Jackson, asking God why He would suffer white people to keep slaves, while Jackson looks on approvingly. Um, Jackson did fight for the Confederacy, right? In another scene deeply reminiscent of Lost Cause mythology, Martha protects the home and property of the white family that owns her as property by pretending to be free. She claims their home as her property, but only until the Yankees are routed and "her" whites return.

These portrayals are a far cry from The Birth of a Nation's black beasts, but not so terribly far from Gone with the Wind's loyal slaves. In the old days, both black characters would have inveighed against Yankeedom in general and invading Union troops in particular. Not so here. While the Yankees who move into Fredericksburg initially seem menacing, they treat Martha with respect. And we know that the noble Chamberlain is back there somewhere among the Yankees, ready to quote Tacitus on man's inherent humanity. The consequence of "G&G"'s presentation of slaves is thus to minimize the actual conflict and animosity between Union and Confederate. In the older films, loyal slaves were made to speak such parts; in the new film, they are simply ignored, thus eliding the entire issue of sectional animosity. Aside from an important initial scene in the Virginia legislature (Robert Byrd gets a cameo here; he may have been present at the historical original), during which Yankee "aggression" is loudly denounced, the film remains remarkably moot on the divisive question of which side was wrong.

The point is not that the black characters in "G&G" are ahistorical, nor even that they are implausible. No, the point is that they are unitary and atypical. Of all the opportunities to portray African Americans and issues of race, why did the filmmakers choose these -- two characters who repeat the same theme of the loyal slave who would like to not be a slave? A film of this sweep and expense does not leave the sensitive issue of race unthought; no, the choices made here were conscious and meaningful. This, then, is how the filmmakers have chosen to negotiate the difficult terrain of race in this film. We are to see the blacks of the old kind of Civil War story (the loyal and helpful ones), but modernized a bit with of rhetoric so mild that it cannot even be called antislavery. Has history actually gone backwards? Remember "Roots," or "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman"? Even Glory was more historically honest than "G&G."

Does this really help us understand what the war was about? It does not. Slavery is reduced to a troublesome plot theme that must be maneuvered around so that the "real" story -- of the fighting men -- can be told. That the history is mangled in "G&G" is of less importance than the film's sheer neglect of the actual role of race in the conflict. We are never even aware that the bulk of Confederate officers and a good many Union ones supported the institution of slavery. Nor are we witness to the vigorous policies of the Confederate government to buttress the slave regime (through provisions such as the "Twenty Negro Law"), nor to the Union government to sustain slavery early in the war (such as Lincoln's repeal of several field orders freeing slaves of Confederate sympathizers). We are certainly not enlightened on the crucial role played by the tens of thousands of African Americans who, by fleeing plantations and presenting themselves to Union lines, presented Federal policymakers with dilemmas that eventually brought about universal emancipation. Slavery as the root cause of the war is never addressed, nor is the troublesome outcome of the Civil War -- Reconstruction -- on the agenda.

The old movies, for all their horrible racism, at least thought that the story was incomplete unless the before and after of the war were told. The current spirit seems to be that the Civil War must be actively de-contextualized, taken out of its underlying causes and consequences. Those, after all, would bring up nasty issues that remain alive and kicking in American society today. I guess we can't have those intruding into our escapist fantasies of the past.

Of course, we can't be too critical of "G&G" for playing it safe. It's not as if Hollywood is in the business of taking risks. The big studios much prefer small independent studios to take on the perilous task of testing the public's taste; once a new genre emerges, the big studios pounce, repeating proven formulas until the profit well runs dry. This is exactly what happened with the African-American hit Soul Food (1997), which wound up with a ludicrously high cost-of-production to profit ratio, and brought Hollywood money pouring into later offerings, like How Stella God Her Groove Back (1998). Yes, it's to be expected that "G&G"'s writers and producers have yet again shied away from saying something meaningful, if difficult and challenging, about the Civil War. But that doesn't mean we have to like it. And it certainly doesn't mean we have to excuse it.

I suspect that such words will fall mostly on deaf ears. Perhaps Turner and Maxwell have given the people -- or at least the people who will want to see this film -- what they want: guns, glory, honor, manliness, femininity, loyalty, nationalism. But I'm not too cynical to think that there are many among us out here who wish for something a little more incisive. Too often, we throw up our hands at simplistic historical storytelling in films, cursing our movie-going brethren for possessing the mindsets that people like Turner and Maxwell allegedly cater to. I don't believe it. Better historical films don't get made -- not because the public doesn't want them, but because the movie-making industry is too risk-averse to represent the full spectrum of audience tastes. That is grounds for both concern and optimism. Concern, because our past has been taken over by profit machines with little actual interest in skillful interpretation, and optimism because we can do something about it. I say, vote with your dollar. Don't see Gods and Generals.