'Gettysburg'
‘Gettysburg’ By Ken Ringle Washington Post Staff Writer October 10, 1993 | ||
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What Turner and writer-director Ronald F. Maxwell have set out to do is not only memorialize and illuminate what historian Alan Nolan calls "the American holocaust" but to wrest the sensibility underlying this country's cinema from the commercial and auteuristic iconoclasm of Baby Boom Hollywood and return it somewhere closer to the cultural mainstream.
Just as the establishment of CNN in Atlanta challenged (some would say toppled) the long-ruling New York perspective of network television news, Turner's entry into the ranks of big-budget filmmaking could serve as a wake-up call for a creatively bankrupt West Coast industry arrested in an adolescent orgy of sex, sensationalism and exploding cars.
It's fitting that he turned for inspiration to the Civil War, with which in a very real sense all American film began. If "Gettysburg" is not exactly "Birth of a Nation," it attempts -- like D.W. Griffith's landmark epic -- to explore with similar spectacle such weighty abstractions as duty, brotherhood, justice and liberty. And it does so at times to great effect.
But whereas Michael Shaara's "The Killer Angels," on which "Gettysburg" is based, managed the impressive feat of making entirely sympathetic almost every Gettysburg officer, Union or Confederate, the film can't quite bring that off.
The film's weakest role is its most crucial. Martin Sheen's woolly-headed performance as Robert E. Lee conveys little of the character, charisma or aura of infallibility that made the legendary general the closest thing to a universal hero among the generals of the Civil War. Instead he emerges at film's end as a kind of crazed religious mystic: a Confederate Jim Jones invoking his legions to bullets instead of poisoned Kool Aid for no more clearly discernible reason.
Lee is doubly crucial because he, more than any other figure, embodies the Southern cause, and making the complexities and contradictions of that cause at least understandable, if not sympathetic, is the heart of what Turner and director Maxwell had to do to achieve their goal. And that, in the politically correct 1990s, isn't easy.
While virtually all historians agree that the war ultimately hinged on the question of slavery, that does little to explain the many and varied reasons why Confederate soldiers, only a tiny fraction of them slaveholders, fought so long and so well under conditions of such incredible privation. Lee himself, for example, despite his baronial ancestry, detested slavery and refused to own slaves.
There is no proper evocation or explanation in "Gettysburg" of the then-binding force of regionalism -- almost unimaginable in our mobile society today; little real sense of the maverick independence and resentment of authority then close to the heart of the American character (and not just in the South); no discussion of the economic oppression to which Southerners long considered themselves subject by Northern banks and industries.
William Faulkner once said the Civil War was the only socially acceptable way in the 1860s for a man to get away from his wife. In Ken Burns's "Civil War" documentary miniseries on PBS, a Confederate soldier, asked by one from the Union what he's fighting for, answers: "Because you're down here." Such answers make infinitely more sense than charging into the cannon's mouth for the glory of Virginia. But we get little hint in "Gettysburg" of such mundane considerations, nor any discussion of "duty" and "loyalty" to the South eloquent enough to balance the appeals to "freedom" and "justice" made for the North by Jeff Daniels in his often moving portrayal of Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Union hero of Little Round Top.
The result is that even when we're cheering for Pickett's hopeless charge (as we cheer earlier for Chamberlain at Little Round Top), we're not cheering the cause of duty or sectional loyalty, but only praying that more men will survive this madness than we know will -- that valor will yield these men a better fate than to fall by the thousands like scythe-cut grain.
That problematic imbalance is the biggest flaw in "Gettysburg." It undercuts battle scenes of stunning spectacle and power, as well as Kees Van Oostrum's poetic camera work, which is as loving of a cannonade as of a misty mountain ridge line. And without that balance, "Gettysburg" veers close to becoming just another endless war spectacle like "The Longest Day," "Midway" or "Battle of Britain": long on historical shoot-'em-up and short on the reasons why. Turner and Maxwell clearly intend it to be much more, and in the end they only partially succeed.
In its silhouette-against-the-bleeding-sunset shots and surging, manipulative score, you can sense more than a little homage to "Gone With the Wind," Turner's favorite movie, which he purchased in 1986 and for years screened daily for the public at the CNN Center in Atlanta. Maxwell has been just as passionate about "The Killer Angels," which he read 15 years ago and vowed he would one day film. He once sold his house just to retain its movie rights.
"This picture matters. It's about something," Maxwell said at Monday's preview screening at the National Theatre. "It's not a concoction, it's not a deal, it's not 'high-concept.' It's really about something we all care about. It's a self-defining moment in our history."
He and other members of the production team spoke often of the "reverence" with which they approached the project, and while sincerity obviously can't guarantee quality, it's still a refreshing step up from the blatant commercialism of most West Coast media projects.
One could wish for a more coherent explanation of the context of the battle in "Gettysburg." Those new to Civil War history may wish they'd read or listened more in school. Despite its weaknesses, however, "Gettysburg" manages to make us reflect on concepts like duty, honor, loyalty and friendship -- even God -- almost lost to memory in our cynical age. It manages to evoke history itself, reminding a generation that once proclaimed the irrelevance of the past how inescapable the past remains. And like "Glory," a politically more acceptable story more easily and better told, it strikes a small blow for the return of movies as players in the continuing renegotiation of American history.
From his days as a blue-blood-baiting America's Cup skipper -- complete with locomotive engineer's cap -- to his founding of CNN, to his landmark purchase of MGM's film library to his bleeping out of obscenities on his cable station, Turner has long claimed to personify a certain maverick Middle American sensibility resentful of the arrogance and exploitation of Establishment money and power on both coasts.
More valuable to him than his millions, apparently, is the chance they give him to be a player in the culture wars: to put the things he cares about before the public to be thought about and debated. "Gettysburg," in the end, is about the tragic cost of national division and the hope of reconciliation. There are worse subjects these days to make us think about for four hours.
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