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Ride with the Devil (1999)
Jun. 22nd, 2010 09:19 amCriterion has released a new version of Ang Lee's Civil War movie that's a bit over ten minutes longer than the theatrical version. I'd seen that earlier version on DVD before and found it a tale of two halves, with the first half being an utterly gripping war story and the second half a strangely mismatched kind of aimless marriage comedy. Watching the new version, I couldn't really see the differences, but the two halves seemed better integrated. I could now see how ambitious the movie was. It's an attempt to wrestle with the same history as previous Civil War epics such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939).
One of the things that disguises this ambition is Lee's typically understated approach. One of the things I've always liked about his movies is how taciturn they are, how nonverbal. There is always a sense that something is going on in the hearts of his characters that cannot be articulated. Another thing that disguises the epic quality of the story is that it happens on the fringes of the Civil War, in the Border War of Missouri and Kansas. All of the fighting is ultimately pointless skirmishing between guerrilla forces that has no effect whatsoever on the final outcome of the great battles back East and in the South. At the core of the movie is the Lawrence Massacre, when a band of men under William Quantrill descended on a Unionist town and murdered 180 unarmed men and boys in the streets and houses. In the movie, this is portrayed as an act of terrorism with no military purpose. The war has unleashed chaos on the land, and the movie raises the question of how order can be restored under these extreme conditions.
Lee explores the question through two major characters, Jake Roedel, who is the son of a Unionist German immigrant, and Daniel Holt, who is a freed slave. Both of them are fighting for the pro-Confederacy bushwhackers because of loyalty to another person -- Jake to a childhood friend whose father was murdered by Unionist Jayhawkers, and Holt to George Clyde, the charismatic Southern gentleman who manumitted him. Both Roedel and Holt slowly change their minds over the course of the movie, and Lee gets the pace of that change exactly right. In fact, Holt is the key to the story, initially treated as a voiceless cipher who gradually emerges from the shadows until we fully understand what motivates him. In his character, Lee captures the main thread of the Civil War: the freeing of the slaves to become independent actors in the history of the country.
If the movie stumbles (and I'm not sure it does), it is still in the final act, which depicts the development of a relationship between Roedel and a war widow, Sue Lee. I think the problem is that her character is not well-developed, because on a surface level this turn of events is exactly the right move. Again, it personalizes the political in the sense that the creation of an ad hoc family (complete with stepchild) is the new order growing out of the chaos of war. Yet unlike Holt, Sue Lee never really gets a story of her own, and thus her relationship with Roedel lacks depth. There is still something aimless about the final scenes in which she and Roedel come to terms despite themselves, and perhaps something stereotypical in the way that she represents the civilizing, socializing domesticity that will heal the wounds of war.
However, over all the movie does a tremendous job of putting American history into a narrative form. The crosscurrents tearing the country apart and pulling it back together are captured in the most intimate details of the characters' lives. The complexity of human experience is laid out both forcefully and delicately. As a drama, it reaches a crescendo halfway through that was physically exhausting both times I've watched it, nearly unbearably intense. It's a war film, and it does not shrink from the damage done, again presented in the most intimate, personal terms. Again and again, it strives to ground the epic, impersonal qualities of history and war in the simple details of daily life and the human comedy. Somehow it manages to make the human choices that form history both concrete and deeply mysterious, perhaps through that effective use of understatement (despite, or in contrast to, the florid, nearly Shakespearean language the characters speak).
This is one I'll no doubt be revisiting, although not lightly. Between this and Titus (also 1999), the movie watching was a bit on the brutal side last weekend.
One of the things that disguises this ambition is Lee's typically understated approach. One of the things I've always liked about his movies is how taciturn they are, how nonverbal. There is always a sense that something is going on in the hearts of his characters that cannot be articulated. Another thing that disguises the epic quality of the story is that it happens on the fringes of the Civil War, in the Border War of Missouri and Kansas. All of the fighting is ultimately pointless skirmishing between guerrilla forces that has no effect whatsoever on the final outcome of the great battles back East and in the South. At the core of the movie is the Lawrence Massacre, when a band of men under William Quantrill descended on a Unionist town and murdered 180 unarmed men and boys in the streets and houses. In the movie, this is portrayed as an act of terrorism with no military purpose. The war has unleashed chaos on the land, and the movie raises the question of how order can be restored under these extreme conditions.
Lee explores the question through two major characters, Jake Roedel, who is the son of a Unionist German immigrant, and Daniel Holt, who is a freed slave. Both of them are fighting for the pro-Confederacy bushwhackers because of loyalty to another person -- Jake to a childhood friend whose father was murdered by Unionist Jayhawkers, and Holt to George Clyde, the charismatic Southern gentleman who manumitted him. Both Roedel and Holt slowly change their minds over the course of the movie, and Lee gets the pace of that change exactly right. In fact, Holt is the key to the story, initially treated as a voiceless cipher who gradually emerges from the shadows until we fully understand what motivates him. In his character, Lee captures the main thread of the Civil War: the freeing of the slaves to become independent actors in the history of the country.
If the movie stumbles (and I'm not sure it does), it is still in the final act, which depicts the development of a relationship between Roedel and a war widow, Sue Lee. I think the problem is that her character is not well-developed, because on a surface level this turn of events is exactly the right move. Again, it personalizes the political in the sense that the creation of an ad hoc family (complete with stepchild) is the new order growing out of the chaos of war. Yet unlike Holt, Sue Lee never really gets a story of her own, and thus her relationship with Roedel lacks depth. There is still something aimless about the final scenes in which she and Roedel come to terms despite themselves, and perhaps something stereotypical in the way that she represents the civilizing, socializing domesticity that will heal the wounds of war.
However, over all the movie does a tremendous job of putting American history into a narrative form. The crosscurrents tearing the country apart and pulling it back together are captured in the most intimate details of the characters' lives. The complexity of human experience is laid out both forcefully and delicately. As a drama, it reaches a crescendo halfway through that was physically exhausting both times I've watched it, nearly unbearably intense. It's a war film, and it does not shrink from the damage done, again presented in the most intimate, personal terms. Again and again, it strives to ground the epic, impersonal qualities of history and war in the simple details of daily life and the human comedy. Somehow it manages to make the human choices that form history both concrete and deeply mysterious, perhaps through that effective use of understatement (despite, or in contrast to, the florid, nearly Shakespearean language the characters speak).
This is one I'll no doubt be revisiting, although not lightly. Between this and Titus (also 1999), the movie watching was a bit on the brutal side last weekend.
