Canter Bridge

An almost endearing stiltedness undergirds this fine film’s narrative, as though set pieces have been prepared in order to allow the characters to deliver solemn speeches Though this may appear artificial and even insincere to modern movie-viewers, it is a dramatic technique at least as old as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. What Gods and Generals shares with those ancient poetic ballads is the celebration of the fighting man’s nobility, his rage, and the juxtaposition of profoundly ordinary human sentiment alongside the most inhumane deeds one can imagine.

Gods and Generals sustains a tone of deep sadness throughout, the director’s way of highlighting the tragedy of a war fought among brothers. This nation’s founding fathers achieved their political miracle at the cost of leaving the issue of slavery unresolved. It was bound to raise its head in a union-threatening manner eventually. The events of 1861-1865 were the bursting of a wound that had festered as long as it could.

True, Lincoln took the nation to war over the matter of the union’s preservation, but it was slavery and vastly different social visions that placed the union in danger in the first place.

The film follows the trajectory of General Lee and—more prominently—Virginia’s ‘Stonewall’ Jackson. The latter preferred that the eponym be used only of the brigade he led, not of himself. But his grateful men would have it no other way. ‘Stonewall Jackson’ he would be from Manassas on, and ‘Stonewall’ he would die.

Robert Duvall, Stephen Lang, and Jeff Daniels do their characters proud, though it is perhaps Duvall’s General Lee who most rings true to the man’s decency, calm, and painful array of allegiances.

Mira Sorvino briefly lights up the screen as the Maine Lieutenant Coronel Chamberlain’s wife, Mrs. Fanny Chamberlain.

‘War’, one of the characters is early heard to say, ‘is the sum of all evils’ and its reputed provocation by Mr. Lincoln ‘a most dreadful mistake’.

The achievement of Gods and Generals is to show that the waging of war sometimes falls to the most decent of men, who at times find fratricide thrust upon them, carrying the dreadfulness of their predicament to their graves.

This film should be seen by all who care about the formation of the American republic, a city upon a hill that has nonethess found bloody water lapping upon its gates, staining its streets, and drowning numbers of its finest.