Tag: Gods and Generals

Desolation Row.

For the historians and Dylanologists out there (or for those wondering why Dylan would contribute a new song to a flat-out stinker like Gods and Generals), here’s another intriguing passage from Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, on his early days in the archives as a Civil War enthusiast. (Besides Clausewitz, he also professes an admiration for Reconstruction-era Republican Thaddeus Stevens, who “championed the weak” and “made a big impression on me,” in a separate passage. (Chronicles, p. 40))

“I couldn’t exactly put in words what I was looking for, but I began searching in principle for it, over at the New York Public Library, a monumental building with marble floors and walls, vacuous and spacious caverns, vaulted ceiling. A building that radiates triumph and glory when you walk inside. In one of the upstairs reading rooms I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn’t so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times, and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald, and Cincinnati Enquirer.

It wasn’t like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency, and the issue of slavery wasn’t the only concern. There were news items about reform movements, antigambling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious revivals. You get the feeling that the newspapers themselves could explode and lightning will burn and everybody will perish. Everybody uses the same God, quotes the same Bible and law and literature. Plantation slavecrats of Virginia are accused of breeding and selling their own children. In the Northern cities, there’s a lot of discontent and debt is piled high and seems out of control.

The plantation aristocracy run their plantations like city-states. They are like the Roman republic where an elite group of characters rule supposedly for the good of all. They’ve got sawmills, gristmills, distilleries, country stores, et cetera. Every state of mind opposed by another…Christian piety and weird mind philosophies turned on their heads. Fiery orators, like William Lloyd Garrison, a conspicuous abolitionist from Boston who even has his own newspaper. There are riots in Memphis and in New Orleans. There’s a riot in New York where two hundred people are killed outside of the Metropolitan Opera House because an English actor has taken the place of an American one. [Sic — 23 dead. Bob’s probably conflating the 1849 Astor Riot with the 1863 Draft Riots.] Anti-slave labor advocates inflaming crowds in Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Cleveland that, if the Southern states are allowed to rule, the Northern factory owners would then be forced to use slaves as free laborers. This causes riots, too.

Lincoln comes into the picture in the 1850s. He is referred to in the Northern press as a baboon or giraffe, and there were a lot of caricatures of him. Nobody takes him seriously. It’s impossible to conceive that he would become the father figure that he is today. You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song, but there’s a certain imperfection in the themes, an ideology of high abstraction, a lot of epic, bearded characters, exalted men who are not necessarily good.

No one single idea keeps you contented for too long. It’s hard to find any of the neoclassical virtues, either. All that rhetoric about chivalry and honor — that must have been added later. Even the Southern womanhood thing. It’s a shame what happened to the women. Most of them were abandoned to starve on farms with their children, unprotected and left to fend for themselves as victims to the elements. The suffering is endless, and the punishment is going to be forever. It’s all so unrealistic, grandiose, and sanctimonious at the same time.

There was a difference in the concept of time, too. In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sun-set, spring, summer. In the North, people lived by the clock. The factory stroke, whistles and bells, Northerners had to “be on time.” In some ways the Civil War would be a battle between two kinds of time. Abolition of slavery didn’t even seem to be an issue when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. [Sic! Tell that to John Brown or Alexander Stephens. To be fair, though, elsewhere in Chronicles (pp. 74, 76), Dylan notes other theories for the war’s coming.]

It all makes you feel creepy. The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.

I crammed my head full as of much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later.” {Chronicles, pp. 84-86 — emphasis and paragraph breaks mine.)

Look away, Look Away, Look Away Dixie Land.


Woo boy. I’d be remiss to you my readers if I didn’t issue the following warning – do NOT go see Gods and Generals. (For some, this warning came too late – my parents went to see it this afternoon before I could convey the full gravity of its badness.) I go to the movies quite a bit, and this four-hour monstrosity may just be the worst film I ever spent money on. (My ex-wife and I walked out of A Night at the Roxbury, but that was a special case – the tickets were free. And, though I’ve mentioned my contempt for Magnolia a few times here, this was worse.) Sigh. This film was so bad I have to take it in stages…

Historical Context, Part I: Or lack thereof. Gods and Generals has a lot of faults but this has to be the most grievous. I can’t believe it’s the twenty-first century and they’re still making major studio movies about the Civil War like this. You have to get three hours or so into this film (and trust me – a lot of the people in the theater never made it) before you hear anything suggesting that slavery might have something to do with this irreconcilable conflict. Until then, it’s basically all told from the Confederate point of view, with several variations of “No, sirrah, we will not let these vahl, dastahdly Yankees take from us our country” offered up every ten minutes.

Now a film from Johnny Reb’s POV might not necessarily have been the atrocity this film turned out to be if some outside context was added to offset the Confederate perspective. But you don’t get it here. Not only is Stonewall Jackson (the main character) portrayed as a godfearing man who tells his trusty, faithful black cook (more on this soon) that he hopes slavery will end someday, but you have various other Southerners proclaiming that slavery will soon die a natural death, as if the country had split in two only because a bullying North wanted to hasten the end of a dying institution. Obviously, this is not so. Eleven states did not secede from the Union because they thought slavery should die of its own accord. They seceded because slavery was thriving in the Cotton Kingdom as both an economic system and a means of racial control. As Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, noted in March of 1861 (before the war broke out), “Our new government [the C.S.A.] is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Which brings us to race in Gods and Generals. Simply put, this film is shocking in its unnuanced depiction of African-Americans in the South – it’s amazing to me that this film ever got made in its present form. For one, the South seems almost universally white in almost all of the long-angle crowd shots (To be fair, this is Virginia, not South Carolina, and the ratio of blacks to whites would be considerably less than in the Lower South. But not this low.) Then you have the two African-American speaking parts – one a cook, the other a maid, both presumably slaves although I don’t remember it being mentioned. Both characters stick by their Southern masters through-and-through, congratulating them for their military successes and, in the latter case, defending her masters’ house from the rampaging Yankee hordes. You never get the sense that these or any other “loyal servants” might be hoping that the North wins the war, or that it was slave defection en masse that helped to bring an end to the Confederate war effort. As one reviewer noted, the portrayal of black Americans in this film makes Gone with the Wind seem like Do the Right Thing. To sum up, this version of events is SHAMEFUL.

Historical Context, Part II: Even putting these issues of ideological and racial context aside (and let me be clear – I for one don’t think you really can), Gods and Generals is a failure even on its own historical terms. What with the attention devoted in this film to three major battles – First Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, it’s clear the movie is attempting to be a military-history-specific entrant in the standard, Ken Burns interpretation of the Civil War: Brother against Brother, Honor and Loyalty on both sides, blah blah blah. As a big fan of Bruce Catton’s military histories, this might have been enough for me if done well. But, for all the attention paid to brigade movements at certain engagements, or the smashing of Hooker’s flank at Chancellorsville, the macro-military history in this film is completely off. The movie jumps from the Union rout at the first Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) to Ambrose Burnside’s grievous screw-up at Fredericksburg. Which means that, even leaving aside the Western theater, the entire Peninsula campaign, the Battle of Seven Days, and most notably Antietam are NOT EVEN MENTIONED. It’s as if General George McClellan had never led the Union Army. I understand that you can only fit in so much in a four hour film (more on this soon), but at least make mention of the fact that a year and much war has taken place between two of the major setpieces. Why even bother with all the often seemingly-random descriptive subtitles of various brigades (more on these soon too) if you’re not going to bother mentioning the big picture? Even with regard to military history, this film takes place in a vacuum. In one of the few scenes on the Union side, the brothers Chamberlain mull over Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Fair enough, but never once does anybody say something along the lines of, “My goodness, we are kicking serious ass in the Western theater.” One would get the sense that Lee vs. the Army of the Potomac is the only game going, when it is in fact only the major piece in a much larger military story.

Gods and Generals as a Film: Even and despite all these glaring historical inaccuracies, the film still could have succeeded as a film. Take Gangs of New York, for example, which has all kinds of historical problems but still ended up being a reasonably entertaining film. But this film is just tedious and boring. I don’t really have any problems with the length in the abstract. A movie that will do justice to the first two years of the Civil War would need to be something like four hours long. It’s the choices made. On one hand, Abraham Lincoln is not in this picture(!) On the other, we get ten minutes of Confederate soldiers singing Christmas carols, twenty minutes of Stonewall Jackson conducting a near-inappropriate relationship with a five-year-old girl, TWENTY-FIVE minutes of Stonewall Jackson on his death bed (I can’t have been the only person thinking it might be nigh time to bring out a pillow and facilitate Stonewall’s passage to the Lord.) Even the battlefield scenes, which you could argue is the one thing that this film is decently good at, are too long. At Fredericksburg, the Union and Confederate Irish brigades go at it tearfully for so long that even I – an Irish-American interested in the Civil War – thought it was ponderous and overwrought. Deadly dull stuff here.

And then there’s the acting. First off, Robert Duvall as General Lee, while barely in the film, is quite good. Stephen Lang as Stonewall Jackson, given what he had to work with, is also decent. Jeff Daniels, C. Thomas Howell, and Matt Letscher – as Joshua Chamberlain, Tom Chamberlain, and Adelbert Ames respectively – all give convincing performances as fighting Maine men. Mira Sorvino was beautiful and erudite in her one ten minute appearance as Mrs. Chamberlain, even if she was inexplicably using a British accent straight out of a Merchant-Ivory film. And that’s about it. Otherwise, there are some seriously bad performances in this film, the worst possibly being Jeremy London of Mallrats as one of Stonewall’s staff. Some scenes, like the Virginia House of Burgesses moment at the start of the film, come off like third-rate Williamsburg. At other times, I felt like I was watching “The History of the Merton-Flemmer Building” in Being John Malkovich. Flat-out egregious, although to be fair this film relies on so many ridiculous stock-character tropes that some of the bad performances couldn’t be helped. I’ve already mentioned Stonewall’s loyal cook and the sickly five-year-old girl. Mention should also be made of the grizzled Irish veteran, who strangely decides to pal around with the officers all the time. Bad writing, bad acting, the whole nine – this film fails on every level, up to and including…

The Special Effects: Ok, I know one doesn’t go to a Civil War film for the FX. That being said, this film has absolutely, positively the worst special effects I’ve ever seen in a film costing more than $2 million. I don’t know who they paid to make them and for how much, but I could have done it for half and delivered a better product using Adobe Photoshop. Even at the very beginning of the film, before I realized what a stinker I was in for, I was wondering, “Hmm, that’s funny. Why do Washington and Harper’s Ferry look like Naboo?” Every establishing matte shot in the movie looks like it was colored in by a over-caffeinated eight-year-old. One scene early on has a computerized rippling flag which may be the single worst special effect in CGI history. And then there’s the far-angle battlefield scenes, which are honestly so bad I can’t believe they used them so much. Not only did the Union lines always look drawn in, but I swear the same three wounded soldiers keep straggling back. In every shot. Just laughable. Finally, the movie relies quite often on subtitles to explain who and what we’re looking at (and at least three times they described individuals or brigades that had no bearing on the rest of the story – probably a mistake on the editing floor, I guess.) Whomever made these ubiquitous subtitles, I don’t think they realized that their computer has more than one font. What they ended up using was this ugly typewriter font that looked not only awfully cheap and tagged-on but anachronistic. I’m telling you, pay me half of whatever you paid for this garbage and I could have given you some nice subtitles in Bookman Old Style or something. As it is, the fx and subtitles only further detract from a terrible film.

Wasn’t there anything good? Well, not really, no. I did appreciate WETA and MASSIVE’s fx work and PJ’s battlefield directing on LOTR: The Two Towers so much more after seeing Gods and Generals. And I guess there might be a few scenes throughout where you get the sense that this could just maybe have been a better movie. Jeff Daniels’ “Hail Caesar” pre-fight speech was well-delivered, and the standard behind-the-lines North-South goods exchange, when a Union soldier offers to trade General Burnside for a lame horse, was probably the only moment when I was laughing with the movie and not at it. But that’s about it.

No, this movie is terrible. I gave it 1 star for some of the (non-fx) battlefield work, and half a star so nobody would misread (1/10) as (10/10). To sum up, Gods and Generals is awful. You have been warned.

Byrd-Hunting.

Drudge is trying his damnedest today to get a Lott-size stink brewing around Robert Byrd for his Confederate cameo in Gods and Generals. As I mentioned a few months ago, I do think this is a bit strange, but hardly in the league of Lott openly advocating segregation in his capacity as majority leader.

Insurrection.

I’m looking forward to Gods and Generals in spite of this lame new trailer, which not only suffers from a lousy tagline but also covers all the “Southern heritage” bases, from Robert E. Lee exalting Virginia to a glimpse of the battle flag in action. (Trent Lott would be proud.) Well, if nothing else, I’m sure the new Bob Dylan song will be good.

State of Insurrection.


The site for Gods and Generals goes live with numerous new pics, including this one of Robert Duvall channeling Robert E. Lee. Apparently the narrative arc goes from the beginning of the war to the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863…so I presume it ends with the death of Stonewall Jackson. We’ll see. At any rate, between this and Gettysburg, Jeff Daniels must be getting some kind of kickback from the Chamberlain estate. And who’s playing Lincoln?