A likable movie disrupted by disturbing improbables ...

Rating: 6/10 (2 January 2006)

I realize I must sound like a bit of a flake, but the improbable deaths of the Swangers almost ruined this film for me. I would just as soon not have had all the violence that opened and continued in the film to show me that "war is hell", but, I was revulsed by the gore and aware of its relation to war, so, I suppose, it accomplished its purpose, and, anyway, I might not have liked the film as much as I did w/o being manipulated that way. And I wasn't tremendously put off by the historical improbability, as I understand it, of much of what the movie depicted. Neither Confedrate nor Union Army was much for rape during the war, so the historians tell us, and I am willing to believe, but I can't believe some of it didn't go on. Likewise, neither North Carolina rural farmers nor those anywhere else outside of certain border state areas were much afflicted with the relatively able-bodied and well supplied Home Guard depicted here, but there may have been some, and I'm willing to afford a degree of license to the director. But the way the Swangers were murdered was so bizarrely unbelievable, that it jarred me out of the suspension of reason that I'd been willing to afford the film up to that point and made me walk away from it; had I been watching CM in a theater, I likely would have stifled myself for ten minutes or so and then walked out (yes, I also don't take exception to the criticism that the movie seemed overlong). The murder of Mr. Swanger was jarring enough, there had been entirely too little precedent in the movie to establish that the Home Guarders had broken that far with the social contract that they'd had w/ their pre-War neighbors, forgetting the fact that such lawlessness is entirely at odds with the historical record. But then to have the sons come running to their deaths immediately thereafter is too much of an absurdity to tolerate. We are expected to believe that the sons had fought for three years in the bloodiest conflagration to occur in the Western Hemisphere and then, somehow, become so rattled at the actual/potential death of their parents that they run to their deaths like lemmings over a cliff? What detachment did they desert from, one guarding Jefferson Davis in Richmond? Every major Confederate battle unit had suffered severe casualties by the beginning of 1864; even the most innocent of veterans had combat instincts that were not going to be swept aside by death/danger to a loved one, death and dismemberment of one's friends were too constant companions. These battle hardened soldiers came running to their deaths with loaded firearms in their hands! With the enemy in plain view? The likelihood is just too absurd. There were any number of quick and gory ways of killing the Swangers off available to the director that weren't as offensive to logic as the ones chosen; they should have been picked and the scenes used consigned to the cutting room floor. The superb acting - particularly the appealing relationship developed between the Zellweger/Kidman characters - deserved better accompaniment.