Gods and Generals: The Epic That Wasn't

 I'm not a Civil War movie fan. I'm rather a more, shall we say, generalist war movie one. Still, I have watched several feature films about the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history because, like the late Shelby Foote, I believe that we must understand that mid-19th Century tragedy in order to comprehend the modern character of the American people.

As a general history buff, I prefer Ken Burns' 1990 documentary miniseries The Civil War as a source of such a deep comprehension.   Sure, the writers (Burns, his brother Ric and Geoffrey C. Ward) allowed a few factual errors to creep in, but overall the most-watched PBS program in history has depth and a powerful narrative that many "for entertainment" films about the Civil War sorely lack.

Of the three Hollywood-made Civil War epics that I've seen over the past 21 years (including Edward Zwick's Glory), writer-director Ronald F. Maxwell's Gods and Generals is the only one which disappointed me after I watched it.

Based on Jeff Shaara's novel of the same name and intended to be the first part of a now-canceled trilogy, Gods and Generals is the 2003 "prequel" to Maxwell's superb 1993 Gettysburg, which had originally been conceived as a miniseries for executive producer Ted Turner's TNT cable network but released as an epic-length theatrical movie.

Given this creative pedigree - many members of Gettysburg's cast and crew are back in this picture - and director Maxwell's insistence on historical accuracy as far as the real-life elements are concerned, you'd think that Gods and Generals would have been as good - if not better than - the earlier film, which was adapted from Jeff Shaara's father Michael's novel The Killer Angels.

Sadly, Maxwell's ambitious attempt to "set up" Gettysburg by chronicling the first two years of the Civil War - specifically, the major battles in which the participation of Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang) was decisive - in a three hour-plus movie fails - and in more ways than one.

Leaving aside the irrelevant issues of running time and Maxwell's meticulous attention to period detail, Gods and Generals is the antithesis of Gettysburg in that it plays out exactly like a TV miniseries, albeit one with a theatrical-movie budget and high-end production values.

Though the film begins with the U.S. Army's Col. Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall, who replaces Martin Sheen in the prequel) turning down President Lincoln's offer to command the Union Army and accepting, instead, the leadership of secessionist Virginia's volunteer army, Gods and Generals is more or less a biopic of Thomas Jackson, a veteran of the Mexican War who is now a professor at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI).  

As played by Stephen Lang (who also played Gen. George Pickett in Gettysburg), Jackson is a fascinating figure with internal contradictions.  Nominally pro-Union, he nevertheless casts his lot with Virginia (like Lee, he considers his native state to be his "country") with the outbreak of the war in April 1861. He is opposed to slavery, yet defends a system which enshrines it. He is - like most Americans in the 19th Century - a deeply pious man who tries to avoid fighting battles on Sundays, yet is almost cold-blooded in battle.

Not having read the book that the film is based on, I have no clue if Shaara had intended Jackson to be the keystone character in Gods and Generals, but because Lang gets so much screen time, it seems to me that the film should have been titled Stonewall.

Sure, other generals, field-grade officers and a smattering of enlisted men are portrayed in Gods and Generals, including Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine Volunteers (played, as in Gettysburg, by Jeff Daniels) and Sgt. "Buster" Kilrain (Kevin Conway, also reprising the role from the 1993 movie).  Nevertheless, much of the story delves into Gen. Jackson's professional and personal lives, with often jarring effect on the viewer.

Even if the film had focused on one or two battles, Gods and Generals would still have been a disappointment to those of us who like Gettysburg because of its deft handling of a complex battle.

The film, which is three-and-a-half hours long (and would have been longer if the filmed-but-deleted Antietam sequence had been included) not only covers way too much ground (three major battles) but also manages to trivialize the core issue of the Civil War: the South's atavistic refusal to abolish slavery.

Sure, not every movie set in the Civil War has to be about how bad slavery was in the South; the average soldier in the Confederate Army had zero slaves and many Southern officers detested that "peculiar institution," but the two black characters - a white family's maid and Gen. Jackson's cook - are Gods and Generals' token slaves, and their closeness to their white masters is clearly not representative of the evil of slavery.  

To its credit, the movie does render the military aspects of the Civil War accurately - if perhaps a bit bloodlessly.  Uniforms on both sides, as well as regimental colors and weapons and gear, are all realistically recreated.

Additionally, Maxwell 's script - and, I assume, Shaara's novel - blends tons of accurate quotes by all the real-life participants with authentic-sounding but fictional dialogue, and this is fine when the movie tries to humanize all the iconic (and not iconic) generals portrayed here.  

Some of the best lines, such as Lee's comment that "It's a good thing war is so terrible lest we grow too fond of it," are actual quotes from the histories and memoirs of the Civil War.

Gods and Generals was supposed to be followed by The Last Full Measure, but bad buzz and Gods and Generals' lackluster box-office performance convinced Ted Turner to cancel it before production could begin.

As a rule, I never give low marks to movies with long running times on that basis alone.  Gettysburg is also over three hours long and requires a two-sided DVD for home viewing, but I like the earlier movie.

However, no matter how painstakingly researched and depicted Gods and Generals is, I can't seriously recommend it as a film for the average (non-Civil War buff) viewer.  It starts out on an interesting note but then gets bogged down by its soap opera-like subplots involving Stonewall and his wife Anna (Kali Rocha) and its seemingly endless string of battles.