Gore with the Wind (visual pun intended)

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2004)

This could have been a classic anti-war movie, but it fell short because it entered the realm of offense. I could tolerate the battle scenes at Petersburg, including even the throwing of bayonets. War is horrible, and anything less than explicit statement of its horrors is necessary. The Battle of Petersburg presaged trench warfare as practiced a half-century later in World War I.
This movie falls short of greatness because of all the gore not related to battle. So many people and animals are killed in gruesome ways that I had to avert my head several times. That's enough to drop this movie from an 8 to a 7 or a 6.5.
I like the acting of Kidman, Zellweger, Law, and Sutherland; all characterize themselves well. Kidman and Zellweger exemplify the class divide between the elites and the 'po-white trash'; Kidman as 'Ada Monroe' is wonderfully versed in everything devoid of vocational practicality, and Zellweger, as 'Ruby Thewes', is the 'farm-smart' young woman devoid of all social graces and little book-learning; the two are perfect complements. Law convinces one that he has been betrayed by the promises of a cheap and easy victory as the war comes to the point of Confederate doom and that all that is left is the inevitable sockdolager punch into an enfeebled Confederacy. Sutherland, as Reverend Monroe (Ada's father), reminds one an many ways of the 'Gerald O'Hara' patriarch of _Gone with the Wind_.
The gore in part results from the villainous "Home Guard" enforcing its authority against deserters, Union sympathizers, escaping slaves, supporters of any of the above, and anyone with whom the Home Guard has scores to settle. This vigilante force strips all romance from the Confederacy by exposing the Confederacy as a collection of brutal police states and exposes itself as a precursor of the Ku Klux Klan, if not the Gestapo. Add to this the gruesome demises of animals, including a rooster, a goat, and a wild turkey; a rabbit nearly meets such a fate except that the Confederate soldiers in a trench chasing it get blown away in an explosion under the trench. To be sure, they all become dinner, but we don't need to see the inside of an abattoir, do we?
This could have been a great movie, even the most obvious second choice to -Gone with the Wind-... if only the director could have shown some restraint in depicting death. The old Hays Code would have made this a great movie. Excess is not greatness!