And Yet They Made Another

Rating: 4/10 (20 March 2009)

What great scenery, and what big teeth to chew it with!
Now, yes, Jeff Daniels is great as always, quiet and true. Martin Sheen's Lee is majestic, visionary, awesome in the original sense. And Tom Berenger is at his most restrained and earnest.
But for every solid, believable performance, there are two or three outrageous characterizations so large they seem not designed to fit the biggest of big screens. Rather, in the inverse ratio of acting size, a performance as large as Sam Elliott's Buford could only seem appropriate if watched on a cell phone. Stephen Lang's Pickett is so big he threatens to explode my television. And the late Richard Jordan's Armistead, while obviously heartfelt and impressively teary, very nearly blew the windows out of my house. Here's the thing: these are good actors. Sam Elliott's never this bad. C. Thomas Howell and Kevin Conway are never exactly naturalistic, not to say credible, but Richard Jordan's never been so damn unrestrained.
So we must point the finger at this film's writer and director Ronald Maxwell, a finger aimed in persecution of his terrible mishandling not only of some fine performers, but of nearly every element of this godawful production. This pompous dolt has made an embarrassing habit of attacking the work of better men. His idiotic snipings at Luc Besson's Joan of Arc picture - not that I'm defending it - are among the least accurate and most self-serving in the history of sour-grapes hack hyperbole. With GETTYSBURG he leaves himself wide open to broadsides of the same sort of derision, only this time the criticism has some basis in reality.
Maxwell takes Michael Shaara's classic novel and keeps all its philosophizing - the stuff a novel can get away with because of the depth of investigation of which only a novel is capable - while abandoning most of the simple human action that makes the book readable. What remains is three hours of hopes-and-dreams speechmaking, followed by 90 minutes of bad second-unit photography: men running uncertainly up toward the enemy, then performing pantomime stage combat exercises. The battle's most tragic and hideous example of the horrors of war (about which this movie mouths many words), Pickett's Charge, doesn't seem to be in the movie. At least, it is indistinguishable from the other bland scenes of men trotting with muskets that serve only as background to Randy Edelman's obsession with his string section.
Another bizarre mistake, just absolutely unaccountable in a movie this god damn long, is the abandonment of the central character IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MOVIE. Maxwell follows Daniels' Chamberlain from forced march to bayonet charge, and this is in fact the most compelling portion of the picture, featuring the only characters created not just by actors but in the script as well. So when the 20th Maine is moved to the center, where Lee has just announced he will concentrate his attack, the audience is led to believe that they will get to experience the further tribulations of the single unit with whom they have been allowed any intimacy.
Nah. We pick up with Daniels and his brother after the battle, just long enough to see them fade to black.
True, the earlier defense of Little Round Top has moments of tension and suspense. Good work, Ron. So, that's about ten minutes out of, what, two hundred and fifty? Nice. I think Luc Besson, pretentious Frenchman that he is, was quite cowed when he heard that the director of PARENT TRAP 2 had criticized his work. Sorry? You say your prequel, GODS AND GENERALS, was the biggest selling DVD the week it came out? Good, good. Did it make back any of the $50 million it lost on theatrical rentals?
No, I don't think the quality of a movie is measured in receipts. But neither is it measured in the number of minutes your picture runs. Nor in the number of times good actors were clearly told to "go for it! pretend you're on stage in the Astrodome!" I have great respect for the theater, having spent half my life in it. I also know that film is not quite the same medium, not for directors, not for writers, definitely not for actors.
Ron Maxwell doesn't seem to know anything about movies. Given his inefficiencies in this regard, I kinda doubt he's much of a stage hand either. But I bet he talks a good game.