Just as America plunges itself into war, and weeks after the United Nations hid Pablo Picasso’s antiwar Guernica behind a blue curtain, Gods and Generals trudges in with an aspiration to stomp. This prequel to Gettysburg sterilizes causes, effects, and emotional truths of violence; the anguished Cubism of Picasso is more horrifying than anything we see in this Civil War epic.
Battles between the Union and the Confederacy are bloody, but there’s no sense of loss in the film. The cinematography is dry as a fossil; one almost hopes for the tinted hellishness of Black Hawk Down, which, on the opposite end, exploited movie gore.
Cinematic ethics should be considered when making war movies; an audience can become as numb to constant carnage as to the easy deaths of Michael Bay action flicks when killing and dying are used as stunts and choreography. Ultimately, Gods and Generals is the kind of film for historians repulsed by the modern visual honesty, who want the fighting to have the neat consequences of a textbook. My dear American History teacher Ms. Kute lectures with more passion and complexity.
Already this clunky spectacle is being accused of sympathizing with the South. What’s most unforgivable is that it marginalizes the trauma of slavery in the same way that made Gone With the Wind problematic. The two slaves in the movie love their masters, and the virtues of the white people are put on display through cute abolitionist speechifying. Not once does the film allow its black characters to speak for themselves, to reveal their lives independently. And never does it ask the interesting and hairy question of how one can love a person who owns you and will not grant you your human right to freedom.
Just as Gone With the Wind turned the Civil War into Scarlet O’Hara’s glamorous soap opera, Gods and Generals boils it down to the story of Stonewall Jackson’s bravery, patriotism, and religiosity—the traits advertised by our current warhawk president. The movie is most entertaining when it attempts to be personal and human. The highlight is Stephen Lang, who gives a romantic performance with a good deathbed close-up. He, like every other man on the field, is a faultless angel doing the glorious, unchallenged work of his country, smiling steadfastly even as the world around him howls in agony.
By Andrew Chan [MARCH 2, 2003; ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER]