Home >  A & E >  Movies/Videos

Sunday, February 16, 2003

By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor

WASHINGTON -- "Gods and Generals" leaves off where the 1993 movie "Gettysburg" begins.

The new film, coming to theaters Friday, recounts some of the key events that took place during the first two years of the Civil War. It centers on Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, the relentless Confederate general who helped his commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, outsmart and outfight a much larger Union force.

It ends just a few months before the battle of Gettysburg, the momentous and bloody three-day clash in southern Pennsylvania. A Northern victory marked the beginning of the end for the Southern cause, although the war would continue for nearly two more years.

Obviously, the new film requires a broader scope and a wider focus than the first movie. It skips among many more characters and must omit more of the story. Yet the writer and director, Ron Maxwell, describes himself as "fanatical when it comes to historical authenticity."

"The challenge is to sift through what we know to be fact and what we suspect to be fanciful," says actor Stephen Lang, who played Gen. George Pickett in "Gettysburg" but takes the key role of Stonewall Jackson in "Gods and Generals."

That can be difficult in the case of Jackson, a professor at Virginia Military Institute who was called to active duty and pursued the enemy with a literally religious zeal. He figured God had already determined when and how he would die, and so Jackson didn't worry about what might happen to him on the battlefield. In the South, only Lee was more revered.

"I was surprised by the real depth and complexity of the man," Lang said. "He was not, in so many ways, the rigid ascetic so many people mistakenly presume him to have been. He had a very, very pronounced sense of joy and fun. In his life he was quite the practical joker, for one thing.

"When I think of Jackson, I think of, really, an Old Testament figure, because of the way he looks and the way he practiced the art of war. But he was an extremely modern man in many ways. He was totally into self-improvement and self-help. He was into hydrotherapy -- a lot of people were at the time, but he was into all kinds of holistic medicines and healing."

Much of Lang's dialogue as Jackson is taken directly from historical accounts.

"At the time, Stonewall Jackson was one of the two or three most famous men in the world. He was the man of the day. Northern mothers would say to their children, 'You go to sleep now, or Stonewall Jackson's going to get you.'

"Jackson was so iconic and mythic during his own life, on a daily basis, that everything was written down that he did and that he said. So the language is extremely accurate. When you play a figure as renowned, as beloved and protected as Jackson, you sure feel a responsibility to get it right."

That's even more of an imperative with Lee. But Robert Duvall, who portrays the Confederate commander, had personal motives as well.

"My father and all my uncles were from northern Virginia. My father was a military man. He went to the Naval Academy at 16 years old. He was a gentleman, he had a soft Northern Virginia accent. For me, falling into that pattern was not that difficult. But by trying to fall into it, I was being as accurate and responsible as possible to where that guy came from.

"My father's people were Southerners but they were pro-Union. My grandfather's name was Abraham Lincoln Duvall. They were behind enemy lines, but they were Southerners."

Would Duvall play Lee again if Ted Turner, the cable magnate who dug into his own pockets to finance "Gods and Generals," proceeds with plans to film a third and final piece of this Civil War saga?

"I don't know. That's a lot of work. I haven't even talked to them about it. I think they would have to carry it farther than Appomatox. They would have to take it to where he goes to Washington and Lee University and to his death -- some of the things where he went into a church and refused to get down on his knees and worship next to a black man.

"If they put things like that in there, human touches, then I would be interested. Something other than just long speeches."

Jeff Daniels, who appears in both films as Union officer Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, is more than willing to make the third one, should that happen.

" 'The Last Full Measure' -- that's my favorite," he says. "It's so rich and detailed and textured. All I'll add to it is that the horror of the war gets even worse in the last two years, and yet they still kept on. I guess, in a way, there are things that are worth going to even that extreme.

"We're dealing with it now, post 9/11. Are the freedoms we enjoy worth hanging onto? That's the question for me. Do we go into Iraq or not, bin Laden, all that stuff. Is it worth hanging onto? If it's not, then let's not bother. But if it is, this is an example in history when people faced a similar question and decided yes, it is."

If the third movie is made, it will be written and directed by Maxwell, who has been obsessed with the subject matter for the past 25 years. It began when he read Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Killer Angels," the source material for "Gettysburg."

Shaara's son, Jeff, has carried on his late father's work, writing the novels "Gods and Generals" and "The Last Full Measure," which covers the last two years of the war and would be adapted into the final film in the trilogy.

"Poetic license, to me, lives in the areas where historians disagree or where we just don't know," Maxwell said. "It does not live in the area where we know what happened.

"Historical films, unlike other kinds of films, are our common heritage, our common story, particularly the Civil War, which Americans know a lot about, which they hold near and dear to their hearts. I don't think license means just making it all up, changing it to serve the story. The storytelling has to serve what really happened. Everything you see in this film really happened. Nothing has been changed."

Maxwell is as surprised as anyone that the films based on the Shaara books have become his life's work. He quotes one of Jackson's lines from the film: "Duty is ours. The consequences are God's."

"It may sound hokey, but it's the truth. I felt like I was called -- me, little old me from Clifton, N.J. -- to bring this story to the screen. It never let go of me," Maxwell says. "It's enriched my life. It's also given me a deep, deep appreciation for who we are as Americans. It's enriched my feelings of patriotism in words I cannot express."