RIDE WITH THE DEVIL A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 1999 David N. Butterworth
*** (out of ****)
If you compare "Ride with the Devil" to such American Civil War epics as "Gettysburg" and "Glory," then Ang Lee's film is always going to come up short. Although already touted as an epic, the only epic aspect of the latest film from the director of "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Sense and Sensibility," and "The Ice Storm" is its length, and that's only 134 minutes. That's not much of a showing alongside "Gettysburg"'s staggering four hours plus.
So one really needs to look at "Ride with the Devil" on the strength of its individual merits. Fortunately it has one that stands out: strength of character.
The story here is one of a small band of renegades caught in the middle of an escalating civil conflict. The war they wage on the Missouri-Kansas border is not one of North vs. South, Blue vs. Gray, but a smaller, more intimate struggle--that of friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, father against son.
Jake Roedel ("Pleasantville"'s Tobey Maguire), together with his longtime friend Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), George Clyde (Simon Baker-Denny) and George's "freed" black slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), form a band of bushwhackers after Chiles' family is slaughtered by marauding Unionist jayhawkers. These genteel Southern gentlemen, their long hair flowing like lions' manes, take it upon themselves to rid the surrounding countryside of anyone they suspect of being a Yankee sympathizer.
Jake and his fellow mercenaries hole up for the winter in a makeshift shelter they've dug out of the side of a hill on the property of a pro-Southern landowner. The landowner's daughter Sue Lee Shelley (pop ingenue Jewel, appropriately subdued) visits them on her mule, bringing them vittles, her prim and proper presence making them all feel a little uncomfortable in their ramshackle, muddy environs.
From time to time there are bloody skirmishes in which nameless, faceless Federals are massacred, young or old it doesn't seem to matter, but the film finds greater strength in focusing its efforts on the men and their inevitable waiting games. This allows for some wonderful character development, especially between Roedel and Holt, whose relationship up until this point has been of the "what are you looking at?" type. Maguire and Wright have exactly what it takes to make their relationship--and resulting friendship--believable, such as the scenes in which Roedel reads letters aloud from a Union-confiscated mailbag to the illiterate Holt. Maguire, typically, does some fine work here.
Writer/producer James Schamus, once again collaborating with director Lee, draws fine Southern sensibilities in a very personal story that treats the Civil War (in the words of Daniel Woodrell's adapted novel "Woe to Live On") as "an open wound." This makes the long, thoughtful "Ride with the Devil" less a history lesson than a richly rewarding character study drawn from a historical perspective.
With any luck the film will be marketed appropriately because with its questionable title and Jewel buttoning down the credits, moviegoers might be excused for expecting "Young Guns 3." "Ride with the Devil" is far better than that.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
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