RIDE WITH THE DEVIL (director: Ang Lee; screenwriter: James Schamus, based on the novel "Woe to Live On" by Daniel Woodrell; cinematographer: Frederick Elmes; editor: Tim Squyres; cast: Tobey Maguire (Jake Roedel), Skeet Ulrich (Jack Bull Chiles), Jeffrey Wright (Daniel Holt), Jewel (Sue Lee Shelley), James Caviezel (Black John), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Pit Mackeson), Simon Baker (George Clyde), Thomas Guiry (Riley Crawford); Runtime: 138; Universal Films; 1999)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Taiwanese director Ang Lee (The Ice Storm), now living in the States, has exploited the rich American Civil War history to tell a fringe story about the war taking place along the Kansas-Missouri border, as he follows a band of Southern bushwhackers who oppose the pro-Union Jayhawkers by waging a guerrilla war against them. It is a darkly violent film that fails to be dramatically engaging, but has its brief moments of edification as it satisfactorily points out how each side harmed innocent citizens in their fight and what ultimately the Union victory meant for the country. But the film could not present a coherent plot, as it seemed to shrivel up as the story dragged on after its colorful battle scenes. Taking the Southern side, the film found humor in the awkward situations presented and found beauty in the landscape photographed, and reasons in the Southern cause which doomed them to failure. But many things about the film seemed to be perfunctory and more like a costume show where the soldiers were more interested in showing off the plumage on their cowboy hats than in giving a dramatic presentation.
Missouri was a slave state that remained loyal to the Union. After an anti-slavery Jayhawker raid on their Western Missouri hometown in the 1860s, two best friends, one the son of a poor German immigrant, the 19-year-old Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) and the other, a son of the old-style of Southern life, Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), hook up with the bushwhackers, a renegade Confederate Army made up of young men from Kansas and Missouri whose aim is for revenge on the Union soldiers and their sympathizers.
"Ride With the Devil" brings us into a world of besieged farmhouses and dusty frontier towns and Southern chivalry toward women, and into brutal battle zones of pillage and killing, of neighbor fighting neighbor. Everyday life is fraught with dangers from raiding partys on both sides. The Southern side has as their inspirational leader, Black John (Caviezel); a mistrustful and hateful sociopath with a need to kill, Pit Mackeson (Rhys Meyers); a cultured Southern gentleman George Clyde (Simon Baker); and an ex-slave of Clyde's who remains loyal to him for graciously freeing him, the wiseman Daniel Holt (Wright). Holt is the contradiction in the Southern cause, as he and the immigrant's son Jake are the outsiders among the Southern fighters, as they don't exactly fit the image of what Southern gentlemen are supposed to be like. Their reasons for joining the Confederate side is both emotional and complex.
The main battle scene restages Quantrill's raid on the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas. The bushwhackers massacre over a hundred of the young men in town and then burn it down. Jake and Holt decide to have a restaurant breakfast in the middle of this bloodshed and are supposedlyresurrected as thinking men against the blatant violence that just took place, as they prevent their cohorts from exercising the unnecessary killing of an older man serving them. It was unconvincing-a John Ford touch put in that didn't have the director's deftness of making it smoothly fit into the story, as it was impossible to disassociate them from the violent army they were part of.
The goal of the Lawrence attack is the burning down of the school at which, one Confederate sympathizer said, the children are educated with "no regard for status, custom and propriety." He goes on to say that this belief in mass education and the democratic values that it expresses spell defeat for the Confederacy, as it stands for values that we can't match. This explains a key weakness of the Southern cause, according to the filmmaker, that the Southern values are tradition-bound and part of a static culture. This becomes the theme of the film and goes for the reason the Civil War's outcome changed the direction the country was going, as the Union victory allowed the country to prosper and grow to become a great nation, as their philosophy for public education and free enterprise took root.
A love story also blooms, as the alluring Sue Lee (Jewel), a recent widow after three weeks of marriage, attracts Jack Bull's attention. She brings scraps of food to him and Jake and Holt, who are hiding from Union troops on the wooded land of her Missouri family who supports their cause, as they built a lean-to out of mud. They have been spending their time having longwinded unnatural conversations that sound much like sermons, so Sue Lee's intrusion is more than welcome at this time. The romance is broken up by more battles and a horrific amputation scene in the hideout where there is no anesthetic administered.
Upon returning from Lawrence and staying in the farmhouse of Sue Ellen's new providers, Jake and Holt find that she had the deceased Jack Bull's baby, and because of Southern conventions regarding morality, Jake is roped into being the widow's next husband.
Though this is a technically correct and serious movie and tries to cover a controversial topic in an intelligent way, yet the presentation of the story didn't seem to always jell. It was a dull film, the acting was misplaced, the story was too distant and the dialogue was stilted. It never got around to being an entertaining film, and it could never be perceived as just an informative film, because it could never quite spit out what it was trying to say. I also found Tobey Maguire's performance grimacing to take--this was the wrong part and film for him to go through his innocent contortions that he has done in all his previous films. He should get a new act, already. On the other hand, pop star Jewel came across as the life-force in the film and breathed some life into the story about how the young were coping with the war.
REVIEWED ON 1/28/2001 GRADE: B-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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