Just the gods

Rating: Null/10 (30 November 2013)

The Civil War is an immensely interesting era. The philosopher, the sociologist, the historian of religion or technology, they can't fail each one to find a rich world to explore. It has everything. A rich political tapestry. War of course. Sagas of both victory and loss. It has on both sides a Cause and closure. Stories of both Northern innovation and Southern ingenuity. Gaffes, some truly huge ones.
Here we get possibly the most senseless aspect of it: the battle itself. The biggest one. The high crest of the Southern tide. The filmmaker has no doubt studied the great battle scenes in film. Eisenstein, Lean, Welles, Bondarchuk. He does mostly well. He covers most of the narrative ground fairly well. He does this all in the naturalistic pace of the western.
Overall it conveys a sense of Gettysburg, and yet it's the sense a highschool history teacher would try to convey to his class. Figures. Speeches. Heroism and futility. I don't know if it's constructive history or not. But here they had an opportunity to do something better. They secured close to five hours of screen time to cover just a few days, an opportunity to go from the epic trajectory, the closed saga, to the openended moment-at-hand.
And isn't this, as much as anything else, what captivates about the Civil War? At so many junctures things could have gone wildly different. Staying on Gettysburg, what if Ewell had taken the high ground on that first day? There is a rich story, the one jotted in so much Civil War literature, and yet at every point indeterminate horizons suggest parallel universes to ponder. But how to exemplify this as cinematic horizon?
A striking moment early in the film is where Lee with his aides is startled to hear artillery in the distance, what Lee doesn't know yet is that Southern troops a few miles ahead have run into Union cavalry and the battle has started. Lee turns and asks whose artillery is that.
So here's a war where the commanding general has no way of knowing, and has to wait for someone to ride all the way there to find out, and ride all the way back to report. Can you imagine the eternity of waiting? Of just hearing sounds of war but not knowing just what it means?
But this would require a wholly different film, one that goes where the historian can't with his pen and captures confused humans for whom there is no 'Battle of Gettysburg' yet and all that noise beyond the trees is not yet decisive fate.
I dream about a Gettysburg film that conveys the density of destiny not with speechifying but with spatial density. That isn't full of rousing music over senseless war. That explores the rich possibilities of sound and space, concealment and presence, one that is as gruelling to watch as it must have been for a young Union boy staring at the woods for hours waiting for rebels to materialize. This is too palatable. Too educative.