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Gods and generals. (Film Reviews).

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Produced by Ted Turner, Mace Neufeld, Suzanne Arden and Robert Katz; directed by Ronald Maxwell; screenplay by Ronald Maxwell, based on the novel by Jeff Shaara; cinematography by Kees Van Oostrum; production design by Michael Z. Hanan; edited by Corky Ehlers: original music by Randy Edelman, Mark Frizzell and Bob Dylan; starring Jeff Daniels, Stephen Lang, Robert Duvall, Mira Sorvino, Kevin Conway. C. Thomas Howell, Frankie Faison, Kali Rocha, Mia Dillon and Bruce Boxleitner. Color, 229 mins. A Warner Bros. release.

At this writing the negative critical and public receptions of media mogul Ted Turner's new Civil War production Gods and Generals have been of such unanimity--denouncing the film as clumsy, ponderous, incompetent--that it might seem not very sensible to spend time giving this film serious evaluation, especially since it faded after a few weeks at the multiplexes. Yet more evaluation may be important, since Gods and Generals says much about the reactionary, racist slant on the American past that saturates large sectors of 'liberal' mass media, in an era of neoconservative retrenchment. While at the moment this movie has largely been dismissed as a terrible bore, it will no doubt find its place in media culture. The few positive comments the film elicited came mostly from conservative publications extolling the film's ideological bent, its rejection of critical, penetrating views of the Civil War and slavery, to the point that such publications ignore or excuse entirely the film's manifest failure as drama--on e would think the movie would be a crashing bore to even the most undiscerning consumers of action cinema, the most diehard Civil War aficionados.

It seems that the film's director, Ronald Maxwell, was focused very much on the film's retrograde vision of the war as its most 'authentic' rendering, assuming that embracing such would give the film real historical flavor. In a much-circulated essay entitled "Beyond the Myths," used in the film's publicity, Maxwell writes that "[the filmmaker] is cognizant of his fellow citizens' legitimate sensitivity" but that "he [sic] must do his best to keep contemporary pressures out of his work." Maxwell in the same paragraph states that if 'he' fails to follow such dicta, "the work risks being a sanitized, lame, gratuitous exercise in political correctness, unworthy of its subject or today's discerning audiences." Let's hope these audiences are indeed discerning. What they see is sanitized and lame for all of Maxwell's assiduous care in avoiding gratuitous political correctness (can we some day dispense with this Stalinist language, imposed on progressive people by mass media when the Reagan era felt a few challenges ?)--that is, a reasonably thoughtful portrayal of America's horrendous slave system and the bloodbath that flowed from it.

The commercial narrative cinema at its beginning conveyed a strong sense of the Civil War's centrality to the nineteenth century and American history. D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation essentially inaugurated the Hollywood film industry. What hasn't been adequately observed is how little Hollywood's conception of that war has progressed since Griffith's 1915 epic, a work whose much-vaunted technical innovation is almost obliterated, to this writer, by its moral barbarism, in particular regarding its view of race and slavery, and its valorizing of white supremacy. I have never accepted the view that...