Thanks for 'Gods and Generals': Michael Medved's open letter to Ted Turner

At this advanced stage of your long and complicated career you have finally crossed the line – making a contribution to your country and its culture so unequivocally positive and powerful that every American, regardless of political perspective, owes you a debt of gratitude.

No matter how one feels about your creation of CNN, your donation of a billion dollars to the UN, your marriage to Jane Fonda, your operation of the Atlanta Braves, your divorce from Jane Fonda, your dismissal of Christianity as "a religion for losers," your bison ranching, or your yachting, or your fanatical feud with Rupert Murdoch, you have now performed a massive good deed that should provoke universal appreciation.

Not that "Gods and Generals" – produced due to your singular determination and generosity – constitutes a perfect film; many commentators, especially among your politically correct pals, will no doubt find fault with it for a portrayal of the War Between the States that aims for truth rather than trendiness. Nevertheless, your personal investment of some $80 million in a project of such audacious ambition has resulted in a major movie miracle. I've been reviewing movies for 23 years now (having started at CNN, in fact) and I've never before sat spellbound for nearly four hours (the film runs more than three hours and 40 minutes, with an intermission) wishing, at the end, that this heroic movie had gone on even longer.

Despite the epic scale of this effort, director-writer Ron Maxwell reached the right decision in making no attempt for comprehensive coverage of the period he illuminates. The movie begins in April, 1861, and concludes 25 months later, making no reference to epic battles like Antietam or the Peninsula Campaign, or to important personalities like McClellan, Winfield Scott, Halleck or Fremont. Even though Maxwell focuses most of his attention on the single fascinating figure of "Stonewall" Jackson, he never portrays that general's most astonishing triumph – the breathtakingly brilliant Shenandoah Valley Campaign in the Spring of 1862, still studied today as an example of inspired leadership and masterful tactics. Maxwell chooses to concentrate on the general's human qualities rather than his undeniable military genius, and the result is a film that should appeal to women as much as men, to history fanatics as well as those who don't know the difference between Bull Run and Valley Forge.

Stephen Lang plays General Jackson with such startling authority and vitality that if there is any justice at all in Hollywood (a dubious proposition), he will receive a Best Actor Oscar nomination next year. The amazing element in this utterly riveting characterization is its balance and complexity: Lang's Jackson is simultaneously fierce and tender, spiritual and practical, petty and magnanimous, eccentric, implacable and incomparably charismatic. The physical resemblance to the historic Stonewall is uncanny, even eerie – complete with the blazing blue eyes that led his men to nickname him "Old Blue Light."

Robert Duvall similarly shines as Robert E. Lee, bringing to crackling life the dignity, poetry and ruthless edge of this legendary commander. Duvall takes over the role from Martin Sheen (of all people) who proved adequate but uninspired in Ron Maxwell's previous battlefield spectacular, "Gettysburg" (1993). Sheen's Lee seemed dreamy, almost effete, and much too kindly; Duvall's "Marse Robert" comes across (accurately) as an altogether more formidable customer.

In every way, "Gods and Generals" shows quantum improvements over "Gettysburg" – reflecting the vastly larger budget which your commitment made possible, Mr. Turner. The false beards and over-fed re-enactors that proved seriously distracting last time have been replaced by impeccable art direction, costumes, make-up and sets. The result, with the sweeping depiction of three crucial battles (First Bull Run, Fredricksburg and Chancellorsville, all filmed on the actual battlefields), ranks with "Alexander Nevsky," the Soviet "War and Peace," and "Saving Private Ryan" in terms of thrilling immediacy. One particularly moving sequence involves Meagher's Irish regiment charging for the Union up Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg, only to run directly into a Confederate Irish regiment, greeting them with recognition, tears, cheers, and deadly, withering fire.

With its emphasis on Jackson, including his moving friendship with a 5-year-old-girl during the Christmas season break in the fighting in 1862, "Gods and Generals" will undoubtedly draw criticism for its sympathetic treatment of the Confederate cause. In fact, Maxwell's four hours of cinema provide a richer understanding of Southern motivation and passions than Ken Burns ever did in his hours and hours of gripping documentary on PBS. Looking down at the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, just before the battle, Maxwell provides a stunningly effective speech for Robert E. Lee, as he recalls that he met his wife in that very village. "It's something these Yankees do not understand," he says, "will never understand. Rivers, hills, valleys, fields, even towns. To those people they're just markings on a map from the war office in Washington. To us, they're birthplaces and burial grounds, they're battlefields where our ancestors fought. They're places where we learned to walk, to talk, to pray. …They're the incarnation of all our memories and all that we love."

Maxwell treats his Union characters with less love, even while making clear their moral superiority on the issue of slavery.

Jeff Daniels returns to play Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Maine college professor who became one of the major heroes at Gettysburg. Though the events of "Gods and Generals" precede the struggle in "Gettysburg," Jeff Daniels looks unmistakably, distractingly older this time – showing the passage of 10 years. Maxwell also gives him a big moment before the Federal charge at Fredericksburg in which he recites the timeless words of Julius Caesar to inspire his men. The historical Chamberlain might well have delivered such a speech, but the hammy, lengthy, Latinate, declamation fizzles on screen. The heavy, intrusive and occasionally lumpish musical score by Randy Edelman and John Frizzell works poorly for this sequence, and other key moments in the movie.

Nevertheless, "Gods and Generals" inflames the imagination and inspires the soul – never more than in its frank, friendly treatment of the deep religiosity of men on both sides. The compassionate re-creation of so many vivid, decent characters never apologizes the paradox that soldiers in both blue and gray remained convinced that they served the Almighty's will in battle; Maxwell allows us to believe that both sides may have been right.

Small moments provide some of the movie's richest gifts: with Jackson and other officers singing "Silent Night" at a Christmas party while Stonewall yearns to see the newborn daughter he has never met; a Rebel and a Yankee walking on stones to the middle of a river, to trade tobacco for coffee and to pass a few peaceful moments; Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain explaining to his distraught wife (superbly played by Mira Sorvino) why he feels compelled to risk his life far from home; Lee declining to visit the wounded, dying Jackson, as if this refusal will force his indispensable lieutenant to a miraculous recovery.

There's also a fine moment, Mr. Turner, when your smiling face appears for a few seconds along with other Confederate officers listening to a spirited rendition of the music hall favorite, "The Bonny Blue Flag."

"We are a band of brothers, and native to the soil," sing these sons of the South, and that sense of regional pride, loyalty to hearth and home, permeates this remarkable and richly rewarding movie.

Even those who have criticized you in the past, Mr. Turner, should recognize that with this film you've raised your own Bonny Blue Flag and challenged other Americans of wealth and influence to follow your example. Focus groups and market studies would have tried to discourage you from investing $80 million in a strikingly intelligent four-hour spectacle that never stoops to score cheap political points or conform to current fashion by showing the Confederates as redneck Nazis, or providing a one-dimensional focus on slavery as the only issue in the war.

Any consumers of pop culture who long for more ambition and substance in American entertainment must rush to see this movie; in fact, to show support for bold new directions in cinema, you should see it several times. If this film succeeds beyond expectations it will send powerful messages to the gatekeepers in show business, encouraging a new emphasis on juicy, accurate historical and, yes, religious content.

This movie, in fact, could amount to a turning of the tide in the ongoing battle to enrich and uplift the culture. If that occurs, we must thank God and two generals: Ron Maxwell, and that unlikely leader for the cause of the angels, Ted Turner. As in any great battle, deliverance can come from an unexpected source.

Thank you, Mr. Turner, and I wish you great success with your courageous effort.

Rod Dreher of NRO speaks of the critics:

February 21, 2003 9:00 a.m.
Battle Hymn
A complex look at Civil War believers.

It's been a critical Antietam for the film Gods and Generals, which opens in theaters Friday. Ron Maxwell's Civil War epic got massacred by reviewers. "Turgid, textureless and endless ... history as punishment," was the Associated Press verdict, typical of so many others. "Stiff, ponderous, fluttering in its 'poetry,' and crudely simplistic as an apologia for the Confederate ideology," says Entertainment Weekly. Declaims New York Press: "It is truly a whitewash of the past."

Well. If the four-hour battlefield epic doesn't work for reviewers on an artistic level, it's hard to make a case against that kind of judgment. But the moral and political indictment of the film as a "whitewash of the past" is politically correct slander. Gods and Generals commits the unpardonable sin of depicting the Confederate generals not as prototypes of Goering and Rommel, but as noble, tragic men whose motives for fighting were complex and fully human. The movie invites understanding of the historical south, not outright condemnation, and that's something that the present age will not tolerate.

Gods and Generals, which is loosely based on the Jeff Shaara novel of the same name, concerns itself with key battles in Virginia during the first half of the Civil War. It focuses on three characters: Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels), later a hero of Gettysburg; Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee (a stunning Robert Duvall); and most especially, Lee's right hand, Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang). While there is a great deal of battlefield action, the film takes care to show the thinking that went into each great man's reasons for fighting the war. The Southern side gets much more screen time, perhaps because Maxwell leaned toward the north in his previous film, Gettysburg.

The film is about conflicting ideas of patriotism, God, personal conscience, and history. Its basic point is that Lee and Jackson (like many southerners) fought not because they loved slavery or detested the Union, but because they felt honor-bound to defend their homeland.

What is one's homeland? To mid-19th-century Americans, most of whom never traveled more than a few miles from the place of their birth, the United States was an abstraction. In those days, it was much easier and more natural for them to feel loyalty to their state and its people. The rock singer Little Steven has a great song called "I Am a Patriot," the chorus of which captures this deeply personal sense of nationalism: I am a patriot/And I love my country/Because my country/Is all I know/I want to be with my family/With people who understand me/I got nowhere else to go.

Lee opposed secession, but once the decision was taken, it was this sense of duty that bound him to fight for the Confederacy. If you or I had been Virginians back then, how many of us would have had the courage to have gone north to fight for the Union, or even had the imagination to conceive of such a thing? What Maxwell is trying to do here is show contemporary audiences why good men would take up arms to defend a government and a culture that enslaved other men. It is for much the same reason that black GIs fought bravely in World War II for a country that still didn't guarantee them their full rights: because their homeland asked them to.

Maxwell takes a big risk in downplaying questions of race and slavery here. You can understand why he may have done this; do modern audiences really need to be told that slavery was evil? We see now how vicious and evil slavery was, but if you're trying to show audiences why Lee and Jackson behaved as they did, you're simply not going to put slavery front and center, because it didn't figure prominently in their own deliberations, certainly not compared to the centrality of the claims their native soil had on their loyalties.

Perhaps this explains why some critics find it phony that the film's two black characters, a house slave named Martha (Donzaleigh Abernathy) and a cook named Jim (Frankie Faison) relate so affectionately to whites. It's easy to see these portrayals as Confederate clichés of happy black folks watched over paternally by their masters. This would be wrong, and unfair. However paradoxical, it's simply true that whites and blacks in the south loved each other despite the structural sin in which they were mired.

Anyway, Martha and Jim both express a desire for freedom, and a clear awareness of their people's oppression. There is a lovely scene in which Jim, who prepares meals for Jackson's camp, prays under a starry sky with the general. Jackson is an extremely pious Presbyterian, and prays constantly. Standing next to Jim, with whom he is close, Jackson asks the Lord to protect Jim's family. Jim, also addressing the Almighty, prays, "How is it, Lord, that good Christian men, like some men I know, tolerate they [sic] black brothers in bondage?" The general stands next to Jim, looking heavenward, beseeching God to "show us the way, and we will follow." Jim's face falls. He knows the general, his friend and a good man, just doesn't get it.

That scene serves to illuminate a particularly tragic aspect of Jackson's character. We see him throughout the film intensely praying, seeking to do the will of God. You cannot doubt his sincerity, nor the uprightness of his character. Yet there is a blindness there, an inability to grasp that his ways are not necessarily the Lord's ways. He can be absolutely merciless. One moment he is having gentle words of prayer at the bedside of a dying soldier, and in the next breath is chillingly calling for the total slaughter of the enemy. He is both tender and ruthless — again, a paradox, but a very human and very believable one.

Religion is an integral part of Gods and Generals, particularly on the southern side. Lee and Jackson are forever talking about God's will — Jackson at one point refers to his men as "the Army of the Lord," as he is about to execute deserters — but don't seem much troubled by the question as to whether or not their cause is just in His eyes. Jackson is a true Christian Stoic, believing that man's role was to be largely passive as the will of God worked itself out through history. His conception of God was austere and tribal, as in the Old Testament. Jackson thought God ordained slavery for inscrutable reasons, but in time would end it, if that was His will. Man's role is to wait on God, and accept everything he sends to us.

A convinced Calvinist, Jackson believed God had predestined each man to die on his appointed day. "My religion teaches me that I am as safe in battle as in bed," he says here. "That is the way all men should live, then all men would be equally brave." Yet this same noble conviction that allowed him to bear misfortune with equanimity also kept his conscience untroubled in the face of the unspeakable cruelty of slavery.

By contrast, the god of Col. Chamberlain is the more universalist and egalitarian vision we see in the New Testament. Chamberlain here gives voice to a vision of a God who expects His followers to act as His agents to bring justice to the world. If that should mean war, then we must make sure the ends we're fighting for justify the suffering war will entail. Unfortunately, Chamberlain's view, which I'm guessing is Maxwell's, gets short shrift in the film. Nevertheless, Chamberlain has a good monologue in which he explains that even though slavery has always been with mankind, it is intolerable, and if he has to die to "end this curse and free the Negro, then God's will be done."

There were tremendous historical consequences from this clash of religious visions. A soldier in battle must believe God is on his side in order to bear the pain and suffering of war, yet there is great danger in presuming that the Almighty endorses your actions. He is infinite; we are finite. Gods and Generals is filled with challenging theological questions, but the movie appears to have struck historically and theologically illiterate reviewers as showing little more than a bunch of Bible-thumping rednecks sitting around talking about Jesus while fighting to keep the slaves back on the plantation.

Maxwell told me he made Gods and Generals "without judgment of that generation" of men who fought the Civil War. It wouldn't have been true to history to make a film depicting a simplistic conflict between good and evil. Slavery was completely indefensible, but there was more to that war and the men who fought it than race hatred.

"It's easy to judge [antebellum southerners] because of slavery," Maxwell said. "At the same time we should recognized that they were incredibly faithful people, of incredibly strong fiber. We've descended from those people, and we can take solace from that."

Solace? Maxwell seems to have no use for the au courant idea that all decent people, southerners in particular, must repudiate and be ashamed of their ancestors to be morally and socially acceptable. Brave man. He'll pay.

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