Generally, 'Gods' is just a bad film

As good as Gettysburg was, that's how godawful its prequel, Gods and Generals, is. It may not be the worst war epic ever made - that probably would be Battlefield Earth - but it's darn close to being an unqualified disaster of that magnitude.

Despite the film's admirable ambition of wanting to bring the audience into the politics and psychology of Confederate and Union officers, here is a pompous saga only a Civil War reenactor could love.

Grandiose rather than grand, Gods and Generals suffers from dialogue so florid, so stilted, so pious, that it may be the first Civil War movie enacted in the style of 1860s stage melodrama. If its speechifying is stultifying, imagine battle sequences so uninvolving that it makes you wonder how the guy who brought us Gettysburg could pull this off.

In defense of Ronald F. Maxwell, the writer-director of both efforts, Gettysburg, based on Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, had the benefits of concision. The battle took place over three days, and there were a recognizable number of principal characters.

Gods and Generals, based on the book written by Shaara's son, Jeffrey, has the curse of shapelessness. Set during the prelude and early years of war, the film groans under the weight of so many characters, so many ideals, so many battles and so many impenetrable thickets of facial hair. Some of the actors look like they're wearing dead muskrats on their cheeks and chins.

A dubious distinction of Ronald F. Maxwell's epic spanning the first two years of the Civil War is that it seems to take place in actual time. Although the film's distributor assures me that it runs 3 hours and 40 minutes, by the time I left the screening my hair had grown a foot. Likewise the beard on actor Stephen Lang, who plays Stonewall Jackson. At the beginning of the film he resembled a Confederate general; by the end he looked like a cross between an Old Testament prophet and a member of ZZ Top.

Maxwell attempts to give his sprawling movie shape by focusing on two scholar-soldiers. The Confederate general, Jackson, is a Scripture-quoting professor of philosophy at Virginia Military Institute. The Union lieutenant colonel, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels, playing the character he essayed in Gettysburg), is a poetry-quoting professor of English at Maine's Bowdoin College.

Gods and Generals gracefully illustrates the men's personal similarities - the convivial marriages, the joy in teaching, the intellectual rigor - but stumbles while characterizing their ideological differences.

There's enough verbiage in the film to choke not just a horse but the entire cavalry. It gets in the way of humanizing characters who are waxwork in their gestures.

If this weren't already enough to make this movie a casualty of its own good intentions, then Maxwell's deadening habit of cutting between panoramic shots and close-ups (framing and rhythm more suited to television than to film) would. (And good lord, couldn't Maxwell pep up some of the battle scenes by mounting the camera on horseback so the audience doesn't feel stuck in the mud?)

Finally, Gods and Generals plays less like a movie dramatizing the Civil War than like a high-school pageant reenacting Notable Moments.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Gods and Generals * 1/2

Produced by Ronald F. Maxwell, written and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, based on the book by Jeffrey M. Shaara, photography by Kees Van Oostrum, music by Randy Edelman and John Frizzell, distributed by Warner Bros.

Running time: 3 hours, 40 mins.

Lt. Col. Chamberlain. . . Jeff Daniels

Gen. Stonewall Jackson . . . Stephen Lang

Gen. Robert E. Lee. . . Robert Duvall

Sgt. Buster Kilrain. . . Kevin Conway

Fanny Chamberlain. . . Mira Sorvino

Parent's guide: PG-13 (sustained battle sequences)

Showing at: area theaters