BEFORE: Back to the Civil War tonight. See, I told you we'd get back there. Linking from "The Alamo", Emily Deschanel carries over, which makes this quite easy. I got a bit of a break with the length of "The Man from the Alamo", about 80 minutes, but "The Alamo" was about 2 hours 20 min, and tonight's film is about 2 hours 30 min. What is it about modern Westerns that dictates they have to be so darn long?
THE PLOT: In the waning days of the Civil War, a wounded soldier embarks on a perilous journey back home to Cold Mountain, NC to reunite with his sweetheart.
AFTER: I don't think I could have planned this much better, even though I'm bouncing back and forth between the Civil War and the Mexican-American War and back. The one thing that was really missing from "Gone With the Wind" was a good battle scene (sort of strange, for a film about a war...) and then I dealt with a man labeled a deserter from the Alamo. Tonight's story is about an actual deserter from the Civil War - to be fair, he was injured, and shouldn't have been sent back to fight. Plus he had a hot girl waiting for him at home, so what would you do?
So, once again I've got an unintended theme forming - when given the chance, will a soldier stand and fight, or opt out of the next battle? The main character tonight escapes from a hospital, but then faces the difficult challenge of getting home on foot. For extra difficulty, Southern militiamen are actively seeking out deserters and are given free reign to torture or kill those who harbor them.
Along the way, he meets several unusual people, also suffering from the effects of the war, or their own sins. These include a lonely widowed mother, a disgraced preacher, and an old lady who raises goats. At the same time, his girlfriend is slowly learning to be self-sufficient on her farm, with the help of a more experienced, rugged woman, who's got family drama of her own.
There's something familiar about all this - it took me a while to see the resemblance to "The Odyssey" - and, by extension, "O Brother, Where Art Thou", which also adapted Homer's classic tale by placing it in the American South. But this is perhaps a closer adaptation, since it's got the wartime connection - remember, Odysseus (or Ulysses, whichever) was trying to get home from the Trojan War (and I'll deal with that conflict in a few weeks...).
Similar to "The Alamo", this is hardly an upbeat tale. And whether it has a happy ending sort of depends on your point of view, I suppose. It's tough to say whether Inman should have stayed in the Confederate Army and fought - nobody enters a war thinking they're going to lose, of course, but what happens when it looks like loss is inevitable? Once this happens, does a soldier have a duty to himself, to leave the field of battle and stay alive? (And, by extension, what happens if you start to consider your job a dead-end or a sinking ship? Does an employee have more of a duty to his job, or to save his own sanity and career by walking away? Just wondering...)
Another interesting connection to last night's film - Billy Bob Thornton learned to play the fiddle for his role as Davy Crockett, and in this film Brendan Gleeson is an accomplished violin player, and performed music on-camera as well.
On the plus side, I got that big battle seen that was missing from "Gone With the Wind" - very action-packed, very gritty, the brutality of war and all that. But on the minus side, it got pushed up to the very front of the movie, which meant that a fair amount of time-jumping had to take place, as the soldier had a number of flashbacks about how and why he ended up there - why couldn't the film have started with him meeting the love of his life, enlisting, and THEN shown us the big battle scene. I doubt anyone would stop watching a film in the first 15 minutes, just because it hasn't gotten to the big action scene yet! This story could have easily been told in proper linear fashion.
Also starring Jude Law (last seen in "Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Billy Bathgate"), Renee Zellweger (last heard in "Bee Movie"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "In Bruges"), Natalie Portman (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Donald Sutherland (last seen in "Six Degrees of Separation"), Kathy Baker (last seen in "The Cider House Rules"), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "The Mod Squad"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "The Proposition"), Jay Gammon (last seen in "Life or Something Like It"), Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "Nicholas Nickleby"), Ethan Suplee (last seen in "American History X"), Jack White, Jena Malone (last seen in "For Love of the Game"), Melora Walters, Lucas Black (last seen in "The X-Files"), James Rebhorn (last seen in "Real Steel"), Cillian Murphy (last seen in "Red Eye")
RATING: 6 out of 10 loose shingles
No comments:
Post a Comment