GODS & GENERALS review

What film can turn a stadium seat auditorium into a golden waterfall? GODS AND GENERALS. At only 3 minutes longer than the actual Civil War, for the end credits you see, this movie is beyond a bladder test, it is in fact… a bladder bust.

With the trailer for DREAMCATCHER and the actual theater promos, the film ate what easily felt like 4 hours of my life. Now apparently when the film opens at the end of the month there will be an intermission… However, because Film Critics and folks from Historical Societies have catheters and handi-carry-along half gallon piss jugs, we were not allowed a break. So, if you are like me, and you refuse to leave a film, the last 40 minutes of the film… as the fantastic Stephen Lang’s “Stonewall” Jackson is having his fun in the wilderness and his dramatic post-Wilderness experiences… You’ll feel a tremble in your bottom lip… your legs will begin to involuntarily shake… there will even be a slight stepped on puppy squeal that will whimper its pathetic self from you. Endurance… Well, Ernest Shackleton and his crew had nothing on this audience. Not to say that the siren’s call of the porcelain goddess didn’t beckon a steady flow of border crossers over the course of the experience. Few didn’t leave. Only those that had Mexican Bus travel experience survived undisturbed, though slightly traumatized.

How is GODS & GENERALS?

Well, personally I appreciated the film, but there are better things to spend one’s life doing than to watch what essentially is a mini-series broadcast in one lump, feeling truncated and incomplete (kinda happens when around 2 and a half hours is missing). Yes, there are moments of big screen majesty, but more often, that big screen reveals the Civil War re-enactors falling like red shirts in Classic Trek episodes as they are apparently being shot with invisible 40 caliber musket balls that cause no entrance wounds or exit wounds.

There is a sequence in the film that has to do with Jeff Daniels and his bad boys from Maine being stuck out on the field during the Battle of Fredericksburg for like two days… There’s the sight of vultures circling at one point… but you never get the idea that the sheer enormity of the corpses stink… that the bleeding cadavers of slain men would attract hideous bug life… In fact, they even kinda strive to make it a bit of a pleasant experience with clear skies and a nice nifty light show to entertain the troops up above. Sure it is historically accurate to the letter, but what about the details… the horror of being on that field hiding behind dead and dying men. The sort of details that made a film like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT so frickin great.

Like PEARL HARBOR – this film casts its net over too large a story. Each of these battles could be its own film. Each of these BIG characters, their own story. By pitching them all into the same gigantic stew of a film, by cutting the film down from that 6 hour rendition, what we are left with is a film, that frankly… feels like a disjointed, incomplete, half-assed tale.

Sure, tell us about the Women’s lives of the Civil War. The lives of the slaves in the territory that touched the events. The generals, both North and South. The political speeches, the religious speeches. Multiple battles. A touching side story about Stonewall Jackson and this cute adorable girl he met during the war. This is all PERFECT Mini-Series material. For a FEATURE FILM, it is both too long and at the same time not long enough. It is ultimately unfocused and unsatisfying. It felt like something you’d show to a Sophomore U.S. History class during Civil War week… and not a film that INVOLVES you, CAPTURES the imagination and the HORROR of the Civil War.

This film needs to be made, but it also needs the world of television. This is a MINI-SERIES, not a feature film. It is a good mini-series, but a poor film. The battles are mainly lifeless and boring. I know a good deal about the basic anatomy of the key battles of the civil war. And that’s what this feels like. It feels like a story with no sense of urgency, of involvement, of emotion. It feels as though they are all just waltzing through life, doing their duty. As people die, they do so because they knew they were going to die. It is never really a shock to themselves or the people around them when they crumple very cleanly and softly to the ground.

For the great deal of time I sat there I admired Stephen Lang and Robert Duvall’s work. Loved one of Jeff Daniels’ monologues – and rolled my eyes of some of his others. A lot of the dialogue felt like they were reading correspondences that they most likely wrote during the Civil War, they come across as prepared speeches delivered than emotional moments of genuine improvisation. Much of the film feels as though these people are following those Goofy footprints in a never produced Goofy cartoon – HOW TO SOLDIER IN THE CIVIL WAR.

Best Civil War film ever made? Not hardly. That honor falls cleanly on THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY and THE GENERAL and GONE WITH THE WIND and SHENANDOAH. For the Women of the Civil War, check out the aforementioned GONE WITH THE WIND or LITTLE WOMEN or THE OLD MAID… all of which are excellent and far better than these stiff boards that pass for women in this film. Of course those were fictional films set during the Civil War. For the best based on historical events Civil War film, try GLORY or the miniseries THE BLUE AND THE GRAY or the astonishingly great Ken Burns documentary series THE CIVIL WAR. All of the above is far far faaaar better than this unfortunate butt-numbing experience. No thrills, no chills, no romance. Instead expect proper people doing the proper things at all times. Nothing to ever be offended by. Nothing that ever fills risky, despicable, ugly or even really unfortunate. It is a film that is very much about the expected and never diverging from what is expected. And that is what you can expect.