Picture's Up

Abe on Film

Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

At first it seems odd that there have been few substantive cinematic portrayals of Abraham Lincoln, considering the incalculable impact he's had not only on American history but on the very iconography of what it means to be American.  But maybe that's the reason why: he's become so iconic, so carved in stone, that dramatizing him seems an almost impossible task.  We see him mainly as a mask of Americanness, appropriated every February by car dealerships, but otherwise left out of the mainstream of dramatic interpretation.  Nor is he alone in this: cinema and stage give us few memorable Napoleons or Socrateses either (though 1989's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure boldly essays all three of those historical heavyweights).  The larger a character looms in history, the harder it seems to be to represent them with the specificity that's necessary for good drama -- although Jesus, the most nebulous and iconic of all, has been attempted more often than most: by Willem Dafoe, and Jeffrey Hunter, and James Caviezel, for starters.  Now that we are rounding into the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and now that Steven Spielberg's long-gestating Lincoln project is getting underway with Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role (filling in for the previously-attached Liam Neeson), it might be an apropos time to ask: who is Lewis competing with?  Has there yet been a cinematic Lincoln that tackled, in its full depth and breadth, the complexity of this endlessly fascinating politician whose words and decisions between 1861 and 1865 arguably shaped the destiny of the United States more than any single individual before or since?  The answer, surprisingly, is yes, although it happened on the small screen rather than the big one, in a production relatively few have likely seen.

More on that in a moment.  Thusfar, probably the most famous cinematic Lincoln has been Henry Fonda's turn in the president's size-fourteen shoes in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939).  There is, indeed, plenty to admire here, both in the performance and the casting.  Fonda's resemblance to Lincoln is more than passing -- the tall, gangly profile; the high cheekbones; the deep-set eyes; the unruly black hair.  In his performance, Fonda catches some essential qualities of the man that elude the typical pop-culture caricature of Honest Abe.  Much here also owes to the screenplay by Lamar Trotti, of course.  First, there's the ambition.  Our first understanding of Lincoln in the film is of a man who knows he is destined for bigger things than the one-horse town in which he's grown up.  Because Ford captures the essence of a Young Man on the Make, he gets at an aspect of Lincoln that is too-often forgotten in our post-facto conception of the wise and heroic president stamped by destiny for a Higher Purpose.  There's a scene in Young Mr. Lincoln which looks forward to a thousand lesser movies borrowing the same cliche: Lincoln, unsure where to go next, drops a stick on the ground and lets its wayward fall determine his decision.  This is the gesture of a man who doesn't know where he's going to go, but damn well means to go someplace.  It's kind of a revelation to see the great man so young, so rudderless, so incapable of comprehending what he'll become.

The second half of the movie subordinates itself to conventions of the courtroom drama and becomes, essentially, an extended Perry Mason episode, as trial lawyer Lincoln defends a murder suspect.  I don't know if the courtroom rhetoric displayed here has much to do with the real Lincoln, although the character's way with a joke -- he wins the jury over once or twice at the expense of people on the stand -- seems authentic.  More interesting is a scene about 20 minutes from the end, in which Abe dismisses a helping hand offered by the presiding judge.  Via his flat, reserved tone of voice and some wonderfully slouching body language, Fonda conveys the idea that Lincoln has little respect for this puffed-up factotum and knows the judge is not his equal -- not morally, not intellectually, not any which way.  As he picks up a mouth-harp and plays, pointedly ignoring his interlocutor, Fonda's Lincoln displays something just short of outright contempt for the man who thinks he's offering a lifeline.  Here we get a sense of Lincoln not merely as honest and kind, but as all but bursting at the seams with the barely-concealed awareness that he is generally the smartest person in the room.  I suspect Lincoln felt that way among the townsfolk of Kentucky and he probably felt that way in the courtroom with other circuit lawyers and he probably felt that way in the White House while taking counsel with William Seward, Salmon Chase, and the rest of his august cabinet.

The last scene of Young Mr. Lincoln is one of those overtly myth-making gestures that nowadays we'd dismiss as schmaltzy or overdone: having argued his case successfully, Lincoln dons the iconic top-hat and walks up a breezy hill and seems to be proclaimed for greatness by wind and lightning as the strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" fade up on the soundtrack.  It's a nakedly worshipful moment that modern audiences might be inclined to laugh at; but I'm grateful for this quality that some older films have of stating things outright.  There's a rough-hewn and primal strength to Ford's direction here that, I suspect, will outlast many modern attempts to be clever and ironic and above-it-all.  Ford is all but saying here that we need larger-than-life heroes -- that we need to elevate certain fortunate (or unfortunate) characters to the level of the superhuman.  That Lincoln is one such character (and was already by 1939) is so patently obvious that it gives this sequence, in retrospect, almost the character of a brute statement of unadorned fact.

Yet this is not the best screen Lincoln.  The best screen Lincoln was done by Sam Waterston, and he did it twice, in two different ways.

Sam Waterston in Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1988)

1988's Gore Vidal's Lincoln, a TV miniseries based on Vidal's historical novel about the man during the Civil War, came and went with little fanfare beyond the network marketing campaign that heralded it over two decades ago.  But it can be seen now (at time of writing) in its entirety on Hulu.com, and it's worth the three hours to do so.  Waterston's take on Lincoln is not only -- by a long stretch -- the best attempt I've yet seen at dramatically interpreting the man, it's the only one I know of that even tries to capture essential aspects of his personality.  As adapted from Vidal's novel, this Lincoln is not the "plaster saint" of the $5 bill, but a man of intellectual genius, fierce ambition, ruthless wit, and deeply-ingrained political instinct.  The miniseries' script not only shows Lincoln in the usual places -- at the speaker's podium, or in determined conference with his generals and his Cabinet -- but it shows him in the "smoky back rooms" of the political world too; wheeling and dealing with Congressional Republicans, securing votes, twisting arms, even covering up the odd scandal.  The cumulative effect of this characterization is impressive: Lincoln emerges as an essentially political animal, but also perhaps the most intelligent person in the country at that moment, capable of perceiving before anyone else what the Civil War was about, and then articulating it, and then shaping it to his own ends.  He's presented as both politico and prophet, a character of fearsome complexity.

This is a demanding role and only a virtuoso actor would dare to take it on.  Fortunately, Waterston, besides resembling Lincoln physically (albeit not so strongly as Fonda did), has the chops to handle it.  I've liked Waterston from the moment I saw him in Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields, one hand at his waist, inclining forward irritably as he berated Haing S. Ngor's Dith Pran about something or other.  His performance as Sidney Schanberg was both pissy and essentially courageous, showing his ability comfortably to contain contradictions within his performances.  Five years later, as the almost-blind rabbi in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, Waterston exuded an almost saintly reserve, a sort of willfully naive moral clarity.  Waterston's cinematic career has shown the many notes he can play on his instrument, but I'm not sure any role has demanded more of him than 1988's television Lincoln.  Waterston catches it all: he gets the steely resolve with which Lincoln chooses to discard habeas corpus and if necessary turn Baltimore into an armed camp rather than lose it to the secessionists; the anguish with which he contemplates the death of his 11-year-old son Willie; the spooky prophetic quality with which he states that he will not long outlive the work he has been assigned to do; the fury he feels toward his do-nothing generals, itself an outgrowth of his ability to feel the death of every soldier in the name of the war he is prosecuting.  It's a tour-de-force performance and sets a very high bar for Daniel Day-Lewis to overcome, though much inevitably will depend on the quality of the script Spielberg shoots; an actor can't be expected to play scenes that aren't written for him.

Waterston makes plenty of subtle acting choices along the way, but one of the most obvious is his adoption of a high-pitched Western twang which is probably closer to the man's real voice than the stentorian baritone so often associated with him.  Besides any documentary authenticity, this accent creates a more present, moment-to-moment, thinking-on-the-spot, and irritable Lincoln -- just the sort of tonic to dissolve some of the plaster off the bust of the sainted man.  It also highlights his outsider status within Washington, as a wild and untried Westerner among the likes of Seward and Chase, who were more at ease with the mannerisms of the Eastern elite and who, at least initially, felt themselves more qualified to be Commander-in-Chief.

Waterston's other small-screen take on Lincoln was broadcast two years later, in Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War.  Here, the "performance" consisted of no more than reading some of Lincoln's letters and speeches.  But the weight and heft of Waterston's voice, its seasoned, conscientious wisdom, remained appropriate for the subject matter.  Waterston here abandons the Western twang and reads the documents in his own voice -- appropriate, I suppose, for the more dramatically modest aims of the documentary format, but probably not hitting so close to the mark of what the actual man actually sounded like.  I don't know when this voiceover was recorded relative to when Gore Vidal's Lincoln was shot, nor whether the latter at all inspired Burns to cast Waterston in his magnum opus.  Regardless, the two television productions amount to about as intelligent and thorough a statement on the Civil War as moving pictures have yet seen, and there's Sam Waterston dead-center in both of them. 

Daniel Day-Lewis has his work cut out.

Maxwell Messed Up

Here I am on a Wednesday evening, watching Gettysburg for the eleven millionth time.  Much as I admire this film -- which I've said elsewhere is my favorite war movie -- its miniature flaws are myriad, and examining them can glean some insights into moviemaking.

Take the above shot.  General Meade (Richard Anderson), commander of the Union Army, has just arrived at Gettysburg after the first day's fighting.  He asks General Winfield Hancock, played to ramrod perfection by the wonderfully pockmarked Brian Mallon (whose IMDB page, incredibly, lists only 9 credits, one of them as "Telegraph Operator #3" in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York), whether this is "good ground" to fight upon.  "Very good ground," Hancock replies confidently.  "Very.  Good.  Ground."  Meade replies: "I hope you're right.  Because we're going to have a fight here sure enough in the morning."

The frame I've captured comes just after Meade has delivered that line, which more or less demarcates the end of Act I in this gigantic film whose structure is too vast and sprawling to cram easily into the conventional screenwriting three-act template.  It's a big story beat, a moment of foreboding pause, a moment when we should feel the thrill of anticipation at the epic struggle that is to follow.  A "calm-before-the-storm" beat if ever there was one.

And director Ronald Maxwell messed up the blocking.

Hey, it was probably a long day.  A tight shooting schedule.  Maxwell is a pro and he went to Pennsylvania with $10 million of Ted Turner's money and a bunch of amateur reenactors and Charlie Sheen's dad and he somehow cobbled together this ungainly epic and made it all work.  All the respect in the world to him.

But Steven Spielberg would not have been caught dead ending that scene with that composition.

The scene should end in a closeup of Meade, with Hancock and the other assembled generals arrayed in the background.  The blocking should walk Meade into the foreground before he delivers his ominous last line (some camera movement could assist, but a fast dolly-in would be too on-the-nose), and it should probably be a slightly low angle, to make his figure appear more massive, to give the image more heft at this essential moment.

When it comes to movie direction, camera movement is all well and good, but blocking separates the merely competent from the truly gifted.

"Well, I Am The Nice One"

The Supreme Being, being supreme

My DVD of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits trumpets on its cover, rather poignantly, the following critical endorsement: "*** - Roger Ebert."  While I'm glad Mr. Ebert -- a hero of mine and my single most valued guide through the world and history of cinema -- liked the movie, it saddens me a bit that so magical, imaginative, and inventive a film must brag about receiving a three-star rating that's been bestowed on so many vastly inferior movies.  Wasn't there something more superlative they could have found to bedeck the box?

I think the reason Time Bandits has always connected so deeply with me is that it treats properly of two subjects very important to a certain type of introspective, bookish, daydreaming child -- bedrooms and maps.    In my adolescence, my bedroom -- after I'd gotten one of my own, having had to share with an older brother in younger years -- was a sanctuary where I spent many an hour poring over fantasy and science-fiction novels, scribbling poorly-drawn homemade comics, and letting loose the weak steeds of my nascent imagination in whatever directions they cared to gallop.  Few items triggered my young fancy as powerfully as maps -- the sort you so often seen at the front of fantasy literature, depicting nonexistent worlds, rivers, continents, mountain ranges, cities with funny names.  The ones I liked best had archaic artifacts around the edges and corners -- puff-cheeked faces blowing the winds, sea serpents coiled in the waters, sketches of strange races and creatures found in far-flung domains.  The prototype can be found in J.R.R. Tolkien's hand-drawn map at the front of The Hobbit.

A very unusual map

In Time Bandits, the adventure begins in the bedroom of a little boy that just happens to be a focal point for a dimensional doorway to infinite eras in history and legend -- a fact that the hero, young Kevin, quickly discovers when a medieval knight comes bursting out of his wardrobe and into a forest just beyond the suddenly-nonexistent wall.  This is an obvious metaphor for youthful imagination, and it's been seen before -- most notably in the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis, where a wardrobe similarly becomes a gateway to a magical world, and in The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy walks out of her room into Munchkinland (and into color cinema, in the immortal 1939 MGM film adaptation).  Rather casually, Gilliam's film closes the story with a conventional "it was only a dream" explanation -- then immediately subverts it with a series of surreal and even mean-spirited twists in the film's final moments.  All of this is beside the point -- Time Bandits is too whimsical, too fluid, too married to the incoherent dreamlike logic of childish imagination, for the question of "is it all real?" to have any major relevance to the story's impact.

A child's bedroom as a gateway to other worlds

As for maps, Time Bandits has a doozy -- the film's Macguffin is a map of all the "holes" in reality, through which one may slip from one historical era to the next, and which has been stolen by a band of enterprising would-be-thieves led by the irrepressibly charming David Rappaport.  As, again, with Oz, the film relies on little people to convey the idea of strangeness, Otherness, and magic.  This was a cinematic cliche long before Gilliam employed it, and one of my favorite moments in movies is Peter Dinklage's exasperated complaint to Steve Buscemi's indie-film director in Living In Oblivion that not every dream sequence needs to have a goddamn dwarf in it.  Still, in the case of Time Bandits, the cliche is redeemed by the sheer quality of the diminutive cast.  Rappaport is impossible not to like in everything he ever did (including his lovely guest-star turns in L.A. Law), and a small slice of me died on the day I learned he had committed suicide; but the other Bandits are similarly engaging, particularly Jack Purvis as the fiercely loyal, fiery-tempered Wally, and Mike Edmonds as the not-too-bright Og, whose mind-controlled monologue about "The Most Fabulous Object In the World" is one of the movie's many highlights.

Pod People

The reveal of what precisely that Object is -- and how it ties back into the soulless world of crass consumerism that has turned Kevin's parents into TV-enslaved Pod People, a fate he desperately longs to escape -- is one of Time Bandits's satirical masterstrokes, unveiled against the backdrop of a third act whose setting (the appropriately-named Fortress of Ultimate Darkness) remains one of the triumphs of fantasy film production design.  In such sequences, Gilliam moves so fluently, so confidently, among adventure, farce, horror, and satire, that you're compelled into admiration.  At its best, the film successfully combines the FX-heavy overkill of the post-Star Wars era with the anarchic British wit that defined Monty Python, of which group Gilliam is of course an alumnus.  And if there are occasional missteps along the way -- such as some of the more broadly-comic depictions of historical eras, including a tiresome running gag involving two perpetually-star-crossed lovers played by Michael Palin and Shelly Duvall -- they're easy to forgive.

If there's a bit of stunt casting in having Sean Connery turn up as King Agamemnon, he presides nevertheless over one of the film's most enchanting sequences -- a haunting, beautiful, decidedly un-comical depiction of mythical Greece that, we quickly understand, is the place where Kevin feels most at home, and where perhaps he should have been allowed to spend the rest of his life.  The depiction of Kevin, however, is unsentimental; as played by Craig Warnock, he's likable and well-meaning enough, but also inordinately fascinated with blood and gore, and clearly thinks that the Trojan War must have been a ripping good time for all involved.  If Warnock's performance isn't quite up to the level of Henry Thomas in the following year's E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, it's not so very far off.

A God I could believe in

Of all the depictions of God, or the divine, or transcendent power that I've seen in movies, none pleases me more than the deliciously Deus Ex Machina turn by Ralph Richardson in Time Bandits's finale.  Personifying a certain type of Professorial British Authority -- in whose presence one instantly feels compelled to behave like a sheepish child -- Richardson lovingly clips off some of the screenplay's best lines, and leaves us feeling that, all in all, the universe could be in worse hands than this stern old codger.  If I should ever meet my Maker -- if (as I confess I disbelieve) there is any Maker for me to meet -- I'll be more than a little relieved if it turns out to be something like Richardson's irritable deity.  Praise too is due to David Warner (perhaps the most typecast villain-actor in cinema since the Golden Age trio of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre) who plays the personification of Evil, and who takes evident pleasure in simultaneously contributing to, and skewering, his onscreen persona here.

David Warner has some fun

Gilliam, who has had one of the really fascinating, problematic, up-and-down careers in film directing, went on to bigger if not necessarily better things in subsequent years.  1985's Brazil -- which combines Orwellian dystopia with a critique of mindless bureaucracy -- is considered by many his masterpiece, and he did good work afterwards, from the unwieldy-yet-dazzling Adventures of Baron Munchausen to the grim Twelve Monkeys.  But Time Bandits is the one film of Gilliam's that I truly love.

Agora Review

I sometimes suspect that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is the best thing television has produced.  Look beyond the host’s ill-matched wardrobe and floppy hair and you see a powerful argument for the urgency of curiosity.  It’s never too soon to get at the heart of knowledge about the world, Sagan insists, and his joyful impatience is infectious.  In one episode, Sagan wanders – via the rather dated miracle of 1980-era video compositing – through a model of the famed Library at Alexandria.  He laments the loss of its ancient tomes, and vividly describes its destruction at the hands of an unruly mob amid the collapse of the old Roman Empire.

Rachel who?

One of the chief flaws of Alejandro Amenabar's Agora – a cerebral, polite, well-intentioned if rather inert dramatization of the Library’s last days – is that in its hurry to show the great building reduced to ruins, it never quite shows us what it was like at its height.  Produced with orders of magnitude more money and special-effects technology than Sagan had at his command, it nonetheless doesn’t pull off the central feat of making us believe the Library lives.  Oh, we get a few perfunctory shots of scrolls on shelves, and many a scene of Agora’s philosopher heroine Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) lecturing about the Ptolemaic system.  But there’s not so much as a leisurely pan across the library’s lobby to let us bask for a moment in its glory – and I found myself craving even more.  How were scrolls organized?  Copied?  Lent and returned?  How big was its research staff?  How far did travelers come to see it?  The Library – the greatest spectacle in  Agora and its animating spirit – deserves a sequence as lovingly detailed and meticulously layered as the “follow-the-money” montage that opened Martin Scorsese’s Casino.

Agora’s backdrop is the turmoil and religious divisiveness attending the rise of Christianity in the late Roman empire, but its dramatic core focuses on three of Alexandria’s residents: Hypatia, the restless philosopher who would rather peruse the movements of the stars than notice the well-muscled suitors panting after her; Davus (Max Minghella), her slave, a scientific prodigy held back by the circumstances of his birth; and Orestes (Oscar Isaac), a nobleman who loves her but is rebuffed by her and content to relegate himself to the Friend Zone.  Both Davus and Orestes instinctively sense that Hypatia (or at least her fictional, idealized incarnation in this film) is a genius, and that genius is a thing to be protected at all costs.  They do their best, but their efforts are complicated by a succession of ancient robe-and-sandal-wearing mobs that occasionally seem to have wandered off the set of The Life of Brian.  This moment in history, the film argues, is incompatible with Hypatia’s brand of unmoored curiosity, and she will pay the price for it.

Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and her father Theon (Michael Lonsdale)

Hypatia and Davus are both depicted as individuals centuries ahead of their time.  Hypatia prefigures Kepler and Copernicus by a millenium as she gropes toward the truth about the Earth’s movement around the sun; Davus, chafing at the slavery which binds and limits him, is drawn to the egalitarian ethos of Christianity.  Their different social status, and the exigencies of melodrama, put them at odds, but you can sense Agora’s screenplay grappling with inconsistencies of character.  Davus reveres knowledge yet willingly participates in the Library’s desecration; Hypatia grimly plays the martyr when one would think she’d use every possible trick to make sure her new discoveries see the light of day.

Agora is a handsome production – it has the requisite impressive architecture (hard to know where the set-building ends and the CGI begins), throngs of extras running through streets, and a few images that will stick in the memory, including a dazzling shot that zooms, like the classic short Powers of Ten, from the globe in space to a building at the center of Alexandria.  Weisz brings a welcome dash of specificity and fussiness to Hypatia – rather than a serene, all-knowing patron saint of science, she’s a compulsive workaholic, exasperated at her own social ineptitude.  There are moments where the film transcends the portentous posturing of the Biblical epic, and if at other moments it fails to do this, it’s nonetheless strangely comforting to be reminded that Biblical (or, if you like, post-Biblical) epics are still being made from time to time.  What’s perhaps most pleasing about the movie is its essential love of rationality, of discussion, of the camaraderie of students in pursuit of knowledge.  Would a group of scholars, besieged in their own library by an angry mob and awaiting an uncertain fate, really pass the time by discussing Ptolemy and Aristarchus?  Well – now that you mention it – they might, and one of Agora’s most touching moments has an elderly librarian sitting on the wall, gesturing to the heavens as he casually describes and then dismisses heliocentrism.  The script intelligently places Hypatia’s hypothetical discoveries within a continuum of ideas – she’s not the first person to think the earth might revolve around the sun, but perhaps the first person determined to make the idea work.

It’s tempting to boil Agora’s plot down to a simple conflict of science versus religion, which the screenwriters are clearly at pains to prevent.  The villain here – represented by the bishop Cyril, who leads a Christian takeover of the city – is extremism, not religion per se.  Wise enough and true enough and pragmatic enough, but a little dull.  When it’s so easy to agree with a film’s moral, the mind wanders; after a while you get tired of being the choir that’s preached to (a problem that also plagued Ridley Scott’s nonetheless admirable Kingdom of Heaven, which would make for a nice “can’t we all just get along?” double feature with this film).

The truest emotion at work in Agora is not tolerance or wisdom, but impatient frustration that the chaos and noise of history may have set back the cause of human knowledge by so many years.  For all its flaws, the film powerfully evokes this passion – this endearing undergraduate disdain for the imperfections of history, just as one of Hypatia’s students complains about the inelegance of Ptolemy’s model.  Simply for putting the viewer into that energized frame of mind, Agora rewards viewing.  Just watch Cosmos first.

Why Gettysburg is my favorite war film

Ronald Maxwell’s “Gettysburg,” based on Michael Shaara’s novel “The Killer Angels,” seems an inauspicious entry in the canon of war films.  Certainly there's nothing in it to compare with the directorial mastery displayed by Steven Spielberg in the opening of “Saving Private Ryan,” nor has it the ferociously intellectual quality of Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” nor the operatic sweep of Stone’s “Platoon,” nor yet the lean economy of Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli.” On a first viewing, “Gettysburg” seems rather a mess: at well over 3 hours in length, it’s a huge, lumbering film, packed with scenes of wordy speechifying (including long monologues ripped wholesale from the pages of the source novel), with two central battle sequences that seem to have been cobbled together from a surfeit of footage, rather than carefully storyboarded and assembled shot-by-shot.  The makeup is sometimes terrible; there’s a scene in which General Jeb Stuart is upbraided by Robert E. Lee, and you have to restrain yourself from laughing at Stuart’s ridiculous beard before you can appreciate the rather moving dramatic moment that follows between the two generals.

Little case could be made for “Gettysburg” as the best war film.  As a work of cinema, indeed, it appears only middling.

So why can’t I stop watching it?

What “Gettysburg” does, which no other war film I have ever seen manages to do, is capture something of the innate chaos of battle.  I don’t mean the physical chaos of bodies thrashing about in slow motion, great masses of humans milling around in combat while moving music plays on the score; many films have evoked that, to the point where it’s become a cliché.  I mean the situational chaos, the uncertainty in the commanders’ minds, the way a battle can unfold so unpredictably and so invisibly that the main actors find themselves neck-deep in it before they even know what’s happening.

In most war films, battles tend to be staged like setpieces: two armies come up to each other on a field, stare each other down for a bit, and then one charges the other and combat is joined.  This is what we see in the opening of “Gladiator,” or of “Private Ryan,” or in the climactic confrontation of Kubrick’s “Spartacus.”  There’s a foreordained quality to it: both armies know exactly when and where the fight is to come, and they’ve steeled themselves for it, and so it begins; and it’s usually over within a short time – whether as a result of narrative foreshortening or historical reality.  Undoubtedly, in history, many battles actually unfolded like that.  The combatants met on a big field and knew they were about to fight and they went and fought.

But “Gettysburg” evokes a different sort of battle – a battle that occurs as a result not of collective choice, but of circumstance.  A battle in which the officers on both sides are simply trying to make the best of a bad situation, rather than consciously choosing the ground on which to fight.  A simple, short voiceover narration, with an animated map showing the blue and red lines of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, deftly establishes “Gettysburg’s” central theme.  These two massive armies appear like blind caterpillars, worming their way across the landscape, seeking each other out, always maneuvering, always carrying with them the massive weight of logistics and supply.

We sense, more than in any other film, that an army is a body of thousands and thousands of men, men who must be fed and who must sleep and who must march for endless hours before even reaching the point of combat.  One of the central characters, Jeff Daniels’ Union officer Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, doesn’t even get to Gettysburg until more than an hour into the film.  While the conflict is unfolding up north, Chamberlain and his regiment are hoofing it as fast as they can manage.

Visually, direction's uneven; Maxwell, relying heavily on the use of reenactors, sometimes gives the impression of having turned a lot of cameras on during a staged battle and said to himself, "well, we'll sort it out in the editing room."  The climactic Pickett's Charge sequence is, in this respect, a disappointment; there doesn't seem to be a lot of directorial control exercised over the imagery, and at times it threatens to break apart into incoherence.  Given the logistical, budgetary, and scheduling issues underlying the production, though, it's hard to be too judgmental.  And the use of reenactors bears fruit in certain shots which seem to be ripped right from those old lithograph eyewitness scenes you'd find in the pages of Harper's Magazine and other contemporary journals.  At certain moments, the staging of battles in "Gettysburg" feels eerily authentic -- you find yourself thinking, "yeah, that's probably pretty much exactly how it looked."

In numerous brief dialogue scenes, the film repeatedly reiterates its point about how battles develop chaotically, contingently, unpredictably.  We constantly see officers surveying the land, peering out through binoculars, trying to figure out how much time they have and how many troops they can commit and where would be the best place to put them.  Events are unfolding in real time; nobody has the luxury of simply planting their army and waiting for the battle to start.  The sequence of events begins in earnest when Federal cavalry officer John Buford, played by Sam Elliott with a relish that stops just short of being over-the-top, arrives in town, sees Confederate troops coming, and decides to stage a delaying action to “deprive the enemy of the high ground.”  Later, the battle escalates when Lee confronts General Harry Heth, who has encountered Buford’s men and tells Lee “the situation is very confused.”  Scene after scene shows generals conferring, trying to find the best calculated risk, hurriedly deciding where to place their troops, dealing with situations one at a time.  The larger event, the thing that will be stamped in history books as The Battle of Gettysburg, doesn’t exist yet, isn't complete yet -- is evolving one moment and one choice at a time.

Dramatically, “Gettysburg” deserves more credit than it frequently receives.  This is a film that you’re stunned to realize contains almost as many great acting moments as “Glengarry Glen Ross.”  Begin with Elliot’s turn as Buford.  He’s asked to perform a difficult monologue -- a page of dialogue ripped straight from Shaara’s novel, so ornate and prosy that it would be the doom of many a lesser actor to recite.  But Elliot pulls it off somehow, investing the words with such emotion that Buford seems to be having a transfiguring vision before our eyes.

Sam Elliott as General Buford

 

A parallel scene, much later, is given to Tom Berenger’s James Longstreet, when he describes with chilling precision the doom that awaits the bold soldiers about to make Pickett’s Charge.  As framed in the film, Buford and Longstreet are the two armies’ respective Cassandras: possessing the gift of sight, able to describe with perfect clarity the calamity that is to come before them.  By the mere luck of the draw, one of these men is able to use his vision to affect the outcome, while the other stands helplessly by watching his men get blown into bits.  The connection between them is made explicit when Elliot’s Buford describes precisely the situation that Longstreet will later find himself in: “The way you sometimes feel before an ill-considered attack, knowing it’ll fail, but you cannot stop it, must even take part, help it fail.”

The impressive ensemble doesn’t stop with Berenger and Elliot.  Jeff Daniels turns in one of his best performances as the Union hero, Chamberlain, though unlike Elliot he is not quite able to make a ponderous and prosy speech his own: when he tells a group of mutinous Maine men how important the war effort is, we're inclined to reach for the fast-forward button.  Later, though, Daniels breaks your heart when the film holds on a long closeup of him as his brother tells him of the death of a beloved comrade.  “Yep,” is all Daniels can say, as he clenches his torrential emotions within himself and behind a stoical Northeastern demeanor, and squeezes out a single tear.  That’s an Oscar moment if there ever was one.

Jeff Daniels as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

 

And look at the relish with which Daniels screams “Bayonets!” as he prepares to lead his embattled regiment on a desperate charge down Little Round Top, while Randy Edelman’s superb score swells with emotion.  We immediately sense that this moment will be the highlight of Chamberlain’s life, something upon which he will look back with fierce nostalgia for the next fifty years to come.  War is hell, yes, but sometimes war is also a hell of a lot of fun, this scene seems to say – provided you emerge from it unscathed.

There are smaller actor turns that linger in the mind and bear repeated viewing.  One of my favorite moments shows prickly General Trimble (William Morgan Sheppard) reporting in frustration to General Lee on the failure to capture a critical hill.

William Morgan Sheppard as General Trimble

 

This is the after-action report reconceived as operatic aria; Sheppard shows total mastery of his instrument as he precipitously varies the pitch of his voice, stops and starts again, alternates between apologetic decorum and irrepressible rancor, and holds us enthralled with every word.  In Sheppard’s Trimble is embodied the enormous frustration of the missed opportunity, of knowing that the battle should have gone another way, and that thousands will die because of a foolhardy decision by an incompetent officer.

There's a lot more to discuss about this flawed, sprawling, fascinating film, but I'll have to get to it in another post.  Suffice to say that "Gettysburg" has been an instrumental component in my gradual, hesitant groping toward being a Civil War buff.  The movie helped me turn the corner, to see a key battle as a vast roiling confluence of independent personalities each striving for success, distinction, survival -- rather than as a musty, dead sequence of names and dates buried in a textbook.