RIDE WITH THE DEVIL
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. USA Pictures/ Universal Pictures Director: Ang Lee Writer: James Schamus Cast: Skeet Ulrich, Tobey Maguire, Jewel, Jeffrey Wright, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Simon Baker-Denny, James Caviezel
When "Gone With the Wind" hit the screens, the Civil War was one of the most popular topics in America. You couldn't keep books about that tragic, if oxymoronic, event on the shelves. Now, high school kids think that the U.S. fought in "The Silver War" and that the event occurred in ancient times (about 1955). "Ride With the Devil" is an entertaining way of jogging our memories while providing a look at one particular state which was--as the journalists commonly say about families during that time--torn apart by the momentous, appallingly self-destructive event. Why self-destructive? Simply because the U.S.--unlike the other great powers of now and then such as the former Soviet Union and just about all the sovereignties of Europe--has been protected from foreign aggression by two great oceans only to stupidly battle its own countrymen!
"Ride with the Devil" takes us behind the scenes of a chapter in the history of the Civil War with which few today are familiar. In fact, only those who have read Daniel Woodrell's novel with the woebegone title "Woe to Live On" would have the foggiest notion that a band of guerrilla fighters began harassing and killing Northerners even before the firing on Ft. Sumpter started the war officially, and that these ragtag groups called Bushwhackers actually continued a pattern of vindictive killing up to ten years after General Lee signed off on the peace! Maybe we here in the U.S. are not so different from civil warriors of far less developed countries like, for example, Vietnam, where the southern part during the war were composed of people with divided loyalties-- some fighting for the Communist side, others staying loyal to the pro-Western forces.
"Ride with the Devil" is a long film at 134 minutes, a period of time that could have been justified had the movie dealt with the Civil War on a broader basis. But focussing as it does on the feelings of brotherhood and of tension among these Bushwhackers with a dollop of romance and a considerable amount of humor thrown in, the picture could have been curtailed and tightened. As a force for our enlightenment about a forgotten chapter in our history, the movie is invaluable. As a piece of entertainment, it is spottier in that some of the hostilities within the guerrilla group are not sufficiently developed and the tragic massacre at Lawrence, Kansas in which 180 civilians were killed, was over in a couple of minutes.
The picture is directed by Ang Lee, the Taiwanese born helmer whose "The Ice Storm" was one of the most discussed films of its year and who, as a man who might be considered an outsider, is an ideal person to make a film centering on two outsiders. The action takes place around the Kansas-Missouri border, with Kansas fighting on the northern side and Missouri, though a slaveowning state, surprisingly loyal as well to the Yankees. But the state of Missouri is far from unified, and these Bushwhackers are determined to delete those forces within the area that are loyal to the North and also to plunge across the border to the abolitionist-centered city of Lawrence, Kansas.
Essentially Jake (Tobey Maguire), the son of a German immigrant raised in Missouri is tight with the Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), who as the son of a plantation owner is anything but an outsider. They meet up with a freed slave, Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright) who is loyal to his former master and like a surprising number of other blacks actually fights on the Confederate side. The big villain in the piece is the sociopathic Pitt Mackerson (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a bloodthirsty outlaw who regularly badgers Jake because of the latter's foreign ancestry (German-Americans were generally loyal to the Union side) and has threatened to kill him. Complicating the plot is the presence of Sue Lee Shelley (played by the pop singer Jewel in her first acting role), a liberated widow who has the briefest of affairs with Jack, becomes pregnant, and because of a turn of events winds up as Jake's fiance.
James Schamus's script eschews the sweep of "Gone with the Wind" by delving into the topic of Bushwhackers, but the dialogue is not what you'd call particularly sharp or edgy. Battle scenes, on the other hand, featuring scores of stunt people and filmed in the style of the old Westerns but in a way that might have warmed the heart of Akira Kurosawa, look darn good. The massacre at Lawrence, Kansas does spare the women (these are southerners after all) but we get the impression that most of the killing is being carried out by the more psychotic types among the Bushwhackers since, after all unarmed local residents are slaughtered, their stores burned to the ground.
Jeffrey Wright, who wowed the Broadway world in his role in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," gives a subtle performance of an illiterate former slave who takes on a low- key guise as a guy willing to fight for the southern tradition while dreaming of buying freedom for his mother in Texas. Skeet Ulrich doesn't get to do much, but Tobey Maguire is contributes a warmly humorous performance as a 19-year-old who agrees to a shotgun wedding despite his virginity, and a few other big names like Zach Grenier and Tom Wilkinson add class to a reasonably solid Western on an little known subject. The subtext--that this war brought forth a nation of greater freedom and equality than had been known before but at the sacrifice of a great deal of tradition--is demonstrated effectively.
Rated R. Running Time: 134 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews