Gods and Generals (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Gods and Generals, a 2003 American Civil War film written and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, grossed $12.8 million at the box office. That sum fell far short of what the project had swallowed. Most of the money came from one man, the media mogul Ted Turner, who paid for the film personally. The result was a war drama that critics and historians alike picked apart, and the arguments over it have not entirely faded. Why would a film with its own financier's money behind it fail so completely? What happened to the enormous amount of footage shot for it? And why did historians respond to a story about Confederate generals with such anger? The answers begin with a novel, an earlier film, and a pitch that a studio refused.

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• 2. From Novel to Screen

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  In 2000, Ted Turner pitched an adaptation of Gods and Generals to Warner Bros. Pictures, and the studio turned him down. The source was Jeffrey Shaara's 1996 novel. The film was also a prequel to Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg. Its story follows the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson from the start of the American Civil War to his death at the Battle of Chancellorsville.

  Stephen Lang plays Jackson. Jeff Daniels plays Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Chamberlain on the Union side, and Robert Duvall plays General Robert E. Lee. The cast also features Mira Sorvino, Kevin Conway, C. Thomas Howell and Frankie Faison.

  The price of Turner's decision to go ahead alone was steep. The final cost was $60 million for production and a further $30 million for distribution. That made the film one of the most expensive independent films ever produced.

  Turner put himself on screen too, as Colonel Waller T. Patton. The real Patton was the great-uncle of George S. Patton and was mortally wounded at Gettysburg, a scene shown in the earlier film. Several politicians took small parts as well. Senators George Allen of Virginia and Robert Byrd of West Virginia play Confederate officers. Phil Gramm of Texas appears as a member of the Virginia Legislature, and Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California plays a Union officer. Ed Markey, then a representative from Massachusetts, appears as an officer of the Irish Brigade.

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• 3. A Casting Scramble

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  Russell Crowe was the original choice to play Stonewall Jackson. Scheduling conflicts kept him from the summer and fall of 2001, when the film was shot. Stephen Lang had already begun to reprise his role as George Pickett, but he was asked to take over as Jackson instead. Billy Campbell, who had played a lieutenant in the 44th New York in Gettysburg, was called in to replace Lang as Pickett on short notice.

  Tom Berenger wanted to play James Longstreet again and called it his favorite role. Scheduling difficulties stopped him, and Bruce Boxleitner was cast in his place.

  Martin Sheen could not return as Lee because of contractual obligations to the television series The West Wing. Robert Duvall took the part. He had been the first choice for the role before he decided to appear in Stalin.

  Some smaller roles carried echoes of the earlier film. David Carpenter, who had played Colonel Thomas Devin in Gettysburg, was cast as Reverend Tucker Lacy. Bo Greigh and Trent Walker played two rebel privates who become friends. Walker's Private McClintock followed an earlier appearance as the prisoner in Gettysburg who declares "I'm fighting for my rights."

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• 4. Reenactors and Music

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  The cameras rolled in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, in western Maryland, and in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. Two genuine locations appear on screen. Virginia Military Institute plays itself, and so does Washington & Lee University, which was known as Washington College during the Civil War.

  Most of the extras were Civil War reenactors. They provided their own equipment and worked without pay. In exchange, Ted Turner agreed to donate $500,000 to Civil War battlefield preservation.

  One reenactor group, the 2nd South Carolina String Band, portrays the musicians who play "The Bonnie Blue Flag" during a troop entertainment show. The film also includes Harry McCarthy, the Irish author of that song, as a character. The band's music appears on the soundtrack as well.

  John Frizzell composed the score, with minor contributions from Randy Edelman, who had scored Gettysburg. The soundtrack's most unusual feature is a new song commissioned for the film, written and performed by Bob Dylan. It is called "Cross the Green Mountain" and later appeared on the compilation album The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs.

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• 5. Stonewall's War

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  Colonel Robert E. Lee resigns from the Union army as Virginia votes to secede. Major Jackson, a professor at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, leaves his family to fight at the Battle of Manassas. There, a retreating General Barnard Bee asks him for help against the pursuing Federal army. In rallying his shaken troops, Bee gives Jackson the name Stonewall. The Confederates rout the Federals at Henry House Hill, and Jackson keeps his ranks disciplined even after a spent ball wounds his left hand.

  On the Union side, Joshua Chamberlain moves from teacher to officer. Colonel Adelbert Ames, commander of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, teaches him tactics. At Fredericksburg, Lee, James Longstreet and Jackson prepare a defense on Marye's Heights, behind a formidable stone wall. Several Union brigades, including the Irish Brigade, cross an open field to attack it. Confederate rifle and artillery fire throws them back with heavy losses. Two Irish units are forced to fight each other, to the anguish of a Southern Irishman who believes he is killing his kin.

  Chamberlain leads an unsuccessful attack and finds his unit pinned down in the open. He survives by shielding himself with a corpse until nightfall. The surviving men of the 20th Maine then spend two nights on the battlefield, sleeping among the dead.

  At Moss Neck Manor, a plantation where Jackson spends the winter, he befriends a young girl named Jane Corbin. When he learns she has died of scarlet fever, he begins to cry. His adjutant asks why he weeps for one child and not for thousands of dead soldiers. Dr. Hunter McGuire answers that Jackson is weeping for everyone. Jackson is then reunited with his wife and newborn child just before Chancellorsville.

  Outside Chancellorsville, Lee sees that the Army of Northern Virginia faces a force almost twice its size. Jackson asks his chaplain, Beverly Tucker Lacy, who knows the area, to find a secret route. Jackson then leads a surprise attack on the unprepared Union 11th Corps. His men rout the enemy at first, but they grow confused in the melee and the attack stalls.

  Scouting a path at night, Jackson is caught between the two armies. His own men mistake him and his staff for Union cavalry and wound him badly. Artillery then targets his litter bearers, who drop him. At a field hospital his arm is amputated. Lee remarks that Jackson has lost his left arm, but he has lost his right. Jackson dies soon after of pneumonia. His body returns to Lexington with VMI Cadets alongside, covered by the new Confederate flag.

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• 6. Cutting the Epic

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  Once filming ended, Gods and Generals ran more than five hours. Maxwell, Warner Bros. executives and Turner debated whether to release it as two parts over two years or to trim it into a single film. After test screenings in 2002, Maxwell cut the theatrical version to 3 hours and 40 minutes. His aim was to focus on Stonewall Jackson's story arc. He planned to release the full version as a miniseries on TNT and on home video a few months later.

  Turner's finances changed those plans. He was losing much of his wealth after the AOL-Time Warner merger, and he estimated his investment in the film at 15 percent of his assets. The box office failure led him to cancel the adaptation he and Maxwell had planned of The Last Full Measure. That novel was the third book in the Shaara family's Civil War trilogy.

  The full film reached viewers eight years later. The extended director's cut came out on Blu-ray Disc on the 24th of May 2011. Special screenings across the country marked anniversaries of important Civil War battles. The first took place on the 22nd of July 2011 at George Mason University, for the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Bull Run.

  The restored footage includes a subplot about John Wilkes Booth, the actor who would later assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Near the end of the extended cut, Chamberlain and his wife Fanny attend Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which Booth plays Marcus Junius Brutus. They talk with Booth and his fellow actors after the play. Another restored scene shows Booth in Macbeth in Washington, D.C., with Lincoln in the audience. During the "dagger of the mind" soliloquy, Booth looks directly at Lincoln. Later, offered a chance to meet the president, he refuses.

  A sequence on the Battle of Antietam was also cut from the theatrical version. It shows the battle mostly through Jackson, who played a major strategic role, and Chamberlain, whose corps was held in reserve. The director's cut restores the whole sequence. Most of its fighting takes place in Miller's Cornfield, where soldiers on opposite sides fired at each other from just a few meters apart.

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• 7. Reviews and Awards

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  On the 21st of February 2003, Warner Bros. Pictures released Gods and Generals in theaters. A video game based on the film followed on the 1st of March 2003. Activision Value developed it and Activision published it. The film's listed budget was $56 million.

  Critics complimented the performances and historically accurate details such as the costumes. They criticized the length, the pacing and the screenplay. Rotten Tomatoes lists an 8% approval rating based on 121 reviews, with an average rating of 3.60 out of 10. Its consensus calls the film "a long, tedious sit." Metacritic gives it 30 out of 100 based on 29 reviews, which it labels "generally unfavorable." Audiences polled by CinemaScore were kinder, giving it an average grade of "B+."

  Roger Ebert gave the film one and a half stars out of four. He called it "a Civil War movie that Trent Lott might enjoy." He also wrote that "If World War II were handled this way, there'd be hell to pay." Maxwell blamed the single-release cut for the failure. He said the storytelling "became disjointed in a way that we just couldn't completely fix."

  Some conservative commentators defended the film. Phyllis Schlafly called it "an epic movie that presents truthful history rather than fiction or politically-correct revisionism." She promoted it as a counter to public school history classes. The American Enterprise went further and called it "the best American historical film. Period."

  Awards were scattered. The Stinkers Bad Movie Awards listed the film in several categories of its own, including one for worst on-screen couple. The Golden Reel Award listed Lisa Jaime for music sound editing, and the Satellite Awards listed Bob Dylan's song under Best Original Song. Stephen Lang appears in the MovieGuide Awards' Most Inspirational Movie Acting category for 2004.

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• 8. The Lost Cause Debate

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  Steven E. Woodworth, writing in The Journal of American History, called Gods and Generals "the most pro-Confederate film since Birth of a Nation, a veritable celluloid celebration of slavery and treason." His objection was that the film carries the central themes of Lost Cause mythology, which professional historians had spent half a century working to combat. In his reading, "slavery has nothing to do with the Confederate cause" in the film's world. The Confederates are instead nobly fighting for freedom, and white southern characters keep reminding the viewer of it.

  Woodworth also objected that enslaved people are shown as "generally happy" with their condition. He said the film pays little attention to why Union soldiers were fighting. He faulted it for implying that the South was more "sincerely Christian." Through what he called "judicial omission," he concluded, the film presents "a distorted view of the Civil War."

  Historian William B. Feis similarly criticized the director's choice to favor the simpler, sanitized readings of Lost Cause mythology. George Ewert, writing for the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the film part of "a growing movement that seeks to rewrite the history of the American South." He noted that white-supremacist groups such as the League of the South praised it. The filmmaker and history educator Andrew Rakich called it "the most offensive Civil War movie since The Birth of a Nation." He also criticized its filmmaking.

  The author of the source novel had mixed feelings of his own. Jeff Shaara originally liked the movie, but he later said he was disappointed that it was not closer to his book. He called it "radically different from the book," with characters in the film who do not exist in the novel and many from the novel who never reached the screen. Thousands of people wrote to him through his website, and the overwhelming majority asked the same thing: "How could you let them butcher your book like that?" Shaara said he had no answer, because he had no control or power to change what appeared on the screen.

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