Overall fine; in detail flawed.

Rating: 6/10 (23 February 2007)

There were complaints that Mathew Broderick was too short and unimposing to play Robert Gould Shaw, the Colonel who led the 54th Massachussetts into battle and dismemberment. I don't think I agree. Why should a courageous and even heroic man be made to look like Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses? Weren't there ever any SHORT heroes? As far as I can discern, from what little grasp of historical events I have, the general outline of the plot sticks pretty close to the facts. I don't know that Frederick Douglass was still as prominent in 1863 as he had been earlier. Maybe he was. As the events unfold, though, they ring fairly true. The narration by Broderick is lifted directly from Shaw's letters to his family and they reveal a self-doubt, a contrarian conviction, a dignity, an objectivity, and a humility that all the rest of us must envy. His role in the film is similar to that of Liam Neeson's in "Schindler's List" or Richard Harris's in "A Man Called Horse" or Kevin Costner's in "Dances With Wolves." He is "our" liaison to "them".
Shaw was educated, white, and socially prominent so we get to know a lot about him and the milieu in which he was raised. The Colored Troops, as they were called at the time, are only sketched in by the writers, and only sketchily sketched. There is the angry ex-slave, the wise old man, the good-natured but dumb squirrel shooter, and the poetry-reading New Englander who gets the crap beaten out of him by a racist Mick Sergeant -- for a lofty cause, naturally, as all sadistic drill sergeants are quick to point out. They look a little too much like the crew of the original Memphis Belle. If they were white, there would be a street-wise tough guy from Brooklyn and a braggart farm boy from Texas. The stereotypes are functional, though. Most stereotypes are.
The structure shows us that not all "blacks" were the same. Nor were all "Northern whites" the same. Cliff DeYoung is a Jayhawker, an ex-slave owner, now an abolitionist, who believes his men must be treated like children. There was a lot of that going around. Darwinism was still a radical idea, less than ten years old. Nobody had the slightest idea of how humans had evolved and in the absence of DNA and other biological evidence of racial relationships, judgments were made on the basis of traits that have been shown to be superficial -- hair texture, skin color, the shape of the soft parts of the face. African-Americans were easy targets for displaced aggression just because they looked so different and there were so many of them around. Irishmen stepping off the boats were faced with being drafted into what was thought (wrongly) to be a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. The draft riots of New York City killed more than a hundred people, most of them black, including some in an orphanage.
There were some monumental historical dynamics at work at the time, but no space to go into them, and they're most irrelevant to the movie anyway. (May I suggest reading Bruce Catton's books on the Civil War? Or MacPherson's Pulitzer-Prize-winning "The Battle Cry of Freedom"?) Broderick does pretty well by his role. He toughens up as he goes along. Cary Elwes looks handsome and acts as a humanistic counterbalance. Among the troops, Morgan Freeman is excellent, as usual, though his part doesn't offer him that much to do. What a fine actor he is. And Andre Braugher as the educated New Englander who is a poor soldier is outstanding as well. Denzel Washington was adequate without bringing much else to the party. The score is so bloated with "glory" that it really belongs to some epic about The Second Coming.
Perhaps the scene I found most amusing involved Braugher and the rest debarking in South Carolina and bumping into some local ex-slaves. Braugher is unable to understand them because they're speaking in Gullah dialect, in which a "buckra man" is a boss or, by extension, any white person. The most disturbing scene involved my watching this in a theater in which the audience was largely black and being almost deafened by screams of exhortation as the Colored Troops shot and bayoneted whites. I wonder if Gunnar Myrdal may have been right about race in this country.